To the Editor:

In his otherwise illuminating article, “Immigrants and Family Values” [May], Francis Fukuyama totally misstates my position on employer sanctions in U.S. immigration law.

Contrary to his assertion, I have never authored legislation “strengthening” such sanctions. In fact, I have been on the record since 1986, when these provisions first became law, as actively seeking their repeal.

In my view, employer sanctions are ineffective and unsound. They have given rise to a booming trade in phony documentation. They force employers to play a law-enforcement role, which businesses are ill-equipped to do. Moreover, the evidence shows that these sanctions lead to hiring discrimination against Americans with Asian or Hispanic backgrounds by employers trying to avoid the risk of lawsuit or liability.

Apart from this error regarding my views, I wish to commend Mr. Fukuyama for his perceptive analysis of the social effects of immigration. Far from acting as a source of weakness, immigration enriches and strengthens American society, both economically and culturally.

[Senator] Orrin G. Hatch
United States Senate
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

I know COMMENTARY readers expect red blood in these columns, but I wimpishly thought that Francis Fukuyama’s article, occasioned in part by my National Review cover story on immigration, was very reasonable. It was certainly a welcome change from the grumpiness exhibited by many intellectuals, not least conservative intellectuals, when forced to think beyond the Ellis Island clichés that have paralyzed the immigration debate for a generation.

Mr. Fukuyama made some equally welcome and important concessions to what he (rather alarmingly) calls “the Brimelow-Buchanan argument.” Thus he admits that the current low-skill influx tends to exacerbate the economic plight of low-skilled Americans; that the local impact of immigration can be negative; that official bilingualism is becoming entrenched. Above all, he concedes that the historical American polity has been not just a procedural abstraction but also an ethnocultural—he says “Christian Anglo-Saxon”—community. These concessions are critical, because they inevitably raise the logical possibility that the blessings of immigration may be finite.

I must, however, correct one serious factual error. Mr. Fukuyama too quickly accepts the claim that “neither the absolute nor the relative levels of immigration over the past decade are inordinately high by historical standards.” In reality, including illegals, absolute levels of immigration have matched and exceeded the previous record set in 1901-10. And current immigration is also high relative to the native-born American fertility rate—which of course has collapsed since the turn of the century.

Unless these facts are grasped, the extraordinary nature of the current U.S. immigration situation cannot be understood. For, although Mr. Fukuyama does not acknowledge it, the current influx is unique in that it consists overwhelmingly of visible minorities. And, because of those low native-born fertility rates, this is shifting the ethnic balance quickly—from nearly 90-percent white in 1960 to less than 75-percent white in 1990. Plausible scenarios suggest that whites will verge on a minority within the lifetime of children now born. There is no precedent for a country undergoing such a rapid and radical transformation of its ethnic character in the entire history of the world.

Some COMMENTARY readers will be stirring uneasily at this point. They are used to regarding any mention of race as “racist.” But the onus should not be on the critics of current policy to explain their motives. Instead, supporters of current policy must explain why they wish to transform the American nation as it had evolved by 1965.

For it cannot be repeated too often, although Mr. Fukuyama again does not acknowledge it at all, that the current influx is entirely the result of public policy. It is public policy, in the shape of the 1965 Immigration Act and subsequent amendments, that has permitted the current high level of immigration, degraded skill levels by placing “family reunification” above economic considerations, and effectively discriminated against Europe in favor of parts of the third world.

As Mr. Fukuyama acidly notes, American intellectuals readily spout Civics-101 justifications of immigration in principle. But this has little to do with current immigration policy in practice. Ironically, Mr. Fukuyama himself makes this mistake in commenting on the celebrated controversy about whether a million Englishmen or Zulus would assimilate faster into Virginia. He suggests that a million Taiwanese would “work harder” than either. Maybe so. But should he not then advocate letting them in, rather than the million or so Mexicans and other Hispanics who now arrive here yearly? In other words, reorient current policy toward East Asia rather than Latin America?

This brings me to Mr. Fukuyama’s contention, which I regard as his article’s strained framework rather than its thoughtful core, that immigrants bring desirable “family values” and are therefore not the enemy in Patrick J. Buchanan’s “cultural war.” Mr. Fukuyama admits but does not discuss in detail the large differences in this regard among current immigrant groups—although this again raises the logical possibility that some might be better excluded.

Moreover, Mr. Fukuyama’s rather odd way of approaching the immigration issue obscures a key point: it is entirely possible that an immigrant group could have splendid “family values” and still not assimilate well. For example, it could be impossibly alienated from the host community, perhaps because of the psychological stress of being a distinct minority. It could be systematically criminal, perhaps because of a distressing historical experience with authority, like the Iraqi Christians who heroically run Detroit’s convenience stores and much of its organized crime besides. And finally, of course, the family-valuing immigrant group might just plain not be Americans—which is perhaps what Mr. Fukuyama is hinting about the Hispanic concentrations of the Southwest.

Mr. Fukuyama paraphrases an argument from my National Review article: even if the immigrants are not responsible for “our anti-assimilationist multiculturalism,” we need not pour more oil on burning water by allowing more in. He counters that this argument can be “reversed”: if immigration were stopped, and even reversed, the problem would remain—because it proceeds from a degenerate American elite. Agreed. But this hardly “reverses” my argument. It just restates it. The problem, however caused, may be exacerbated by immigration. Stopping immigration, therefore, could help.

Finally: I still do not agree with Mr. Fukuyama that the “basic complaint” of my National Review article was cultural (although I must admit I appear to be outvoted on that point). I think it was about economics. Referring to the technical economic literature on accounting for growth, I showed that increases in labor are always only a minor component in increased output. Ideas matter more. In other words, immigration is simply not an economic necessity for the U.S. It must be justified on political grounds. I doubt that Mr. Fukuyama would claim he has made that, much more ambitious, case.

As I said in my National Review article, mass immigration into the U.S. has been a triumphant success. But for very specific reasons—many of which (such as an official will to assimilate) no longer apply. The possibility must be faced that it is time to resupply another of those reasons: a pause, of years, or even decades, for digestion.

Peter Brimelow
New York City

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To the Editor:

Francis Fukuyama makes a number of persuasive points in “Immigrants and Family Values.” He is entirely correct to attack nativists like Patrick J. Buchanan who conceive of America as “a Christian, ethnically European nation.” However, in trying to rebut the prejudices of the nativist Right, Mr. Fukuyama makes an equally big mistake: he caricatures native-born white Americans while romanticizing Hispanic immigrants.

Immigrants from the third world, he argues, “have stronger family values than white, middle-class, suburban Americans, while their work ethic and willingness to defer to traditional sources of authority” are also greater. Mr. Fukuyama neglects to consider the possibility that blind “deference to traditional sources of authority” like state and church are impediments to liberal democracy and flourishing capitalism. With regard to the premodern, anti-feminist “family values” that Mr. Fukuyama (now following Buchanan) endorses, it is worth listening to the Latin America expert, Lawrence Harrison: “A principal element of Hispanic culture is familism—emphasis on the interests of the family to the exclusion of the community and country.” Is the mafialike clan morality that Edward Banfield described as “amoral familism” and identified as a major cause of underdevelopment in the third world really the kind of ethic that we want in an open, advanced society?

This assumes, of course, that the “family values” of Mexican immigrants really are stronger than those of white Americans. Mr. Fukuyama’s own data, however, demonstrate that native-born white Americans have much stronger families than Latin American immigrants in general, and Mexican immigrants in particular. According to Mr. Fukuyama, “Mexican-origin Latinos,” with an out-of-wedlock birth rate of 28.9 percent, are more than twice as likely as allegedly decadent white Americans to have illegitimate children (the white rate is 13.9 percent). What is more, he concedes that almost twice as many Hispanic families (24.4 percent) as white families (13.5 percent) are headed by a single female parent. Since white families are manifestly much stronger than Hispanic families, Mr. Fukuyama’s strained attempt to indict suburban whites by associating their divorce and illegitimacy rates with those of inner-city blacks—“what has happened among blacks is only an extreme extension of a process that has been proceeding apace among whites as well”—is utterly unconvincing.

In contrasting hard-working, devout, family-loving Hispanic immigrants with “white, middle-class, suburban Americans,” or “Wasps,” supposedly sinking into ethical “decay,” Mr. Fukuyama also leaves out some readily available information that refutes his thesis. According to 1988 U.S. Census data, foreign-born Americans are 25 percent more likely than native-born Americans to be on welfare. When we turn to education, we find that white Americans are far more studious than even second-and third-generation Mexican-Americans. Linda Chavez, in Out of the Barrio, notes that the dropout rate for third-generation Hispanic Americans is 29 percent, compared to only 10 percent for non-Hispanic whites. In 1988, the overall Hispanic dropout rate was three times greater than that of non-Hispanic whites (and twice that of black students). Hispanics are also considerably more likely than native-born white Americans to be in trouble with the law. In Colorado, where only 11 percent of the population is Hispanic, Hispanics account for a quarter of the prison population.

Hispanic immigrants, even in the second and third generation, are significantly more likely than white Americans (and East Asian immigrants) to drop out of school, go on welfare, and end up in jail, notwithstanding their (exaggerated) greater “family values” and the (equally exaggerated) moral rot “right in the heart of American’s well-established white, Anglo-Saxon community.” For the nativist caricature of third-world immigrants, Mr. Fukuyama substitutes an equally inaccurate and insulting caricature of native-born white Americans sunk in decadence and indolence. Mr. Fukuyama worries that “the immigrants will be corrupted by” white American habits. Since those habits include far higher rates of school completion and dramatically lower rates of illegitimacy, female-headed families, welfare dependence, and criminality, I for one hope that the immigrants are indeed “corrupted,” and soon.

Michael Lind
National Interest
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

After two years of increasingly frank and public debate on immigration, including Peter Brime-low’s massive challenge to the neoconservative pro-immigration position in National Review last year, one might have supposed that COMMENTARY would respond with an article on the subject that would go beyond the familiar open-borders clichés. Instead, COMMENTARY has offered up Francis Fukuyama’s complacent and vapid treatment of the issue. Mr. Fukuyama’s denial of reality is almost total: at this late date, with immigration-related problems tearing up communities all over the country, he blandly refuses to concede that immigration—even illegal immigration—represents any problem at all for America.

Even the one instance where Mr. Fukuyama admits a flaw in the pro-immigration ideology turns out to be a finesse. He acknowledges that America is not simply based on belief in universalist ideas about democracy, but that America is also a culture, even a “Christian, Anglo-Saxon” culture. This appears to be a major concession to those conservatives who insist on American cultural particularity, especially as regards immigration policy. But then Mr. Fukuyama does a very strange thing. He identifies the essence of this newly discovered American culture as “family values,” i.e., as a set of behaviors which promote economic productivity, and which can be expressed with lots of statistics. In other words, Mr. Fukuyama, having conceded that America is not just a political abstraction but a culture, reinterprets that culture itself as an abstraction.

He then devotes the rest of his article to demonstrating the good “family values” of current immigrants. He cites studies showing that Mexican-Americans have more family cohesion than do whites, with higher birth-weight babies even among low-income mothers due to taboos on smoking, drinking, and drug use during pregnancy; and so on.

Mr. Fukuyama’s argument is deceptive on two counts. First, the immigration critics are not concerned about protecting American “family values” from immigrants, as he alleges, but about maintaining a common national culture. Mexicans might have the most stable, loving families in the world and still not be Americans. When the Hispanic population of San José, California, demonstrated against a statue that portrayed the raising of the American flag in California during the Mexican war, calling the statue a “symbol of conquest” and threatening violence if it were erected, the issue was not the birth weight of their babies, but their national identity. When the Cubans who dominate Dade County, Florida, voted recently to overturn the laws declaring English to be the sole language of government, the issue was not the cohesiveness of Hispanic families, but the dispossession of the English language in this country by an even more numerous and powerful Spanish-speaking community.

Second, “family values” can be very different things in different cultures. As Lawrence Harrison has shown, Latin American families have an intense family loyalty and a lack of trust toward those outside the family circle—the results of which can be seen in the unhappy political history of Latin America. Many Asians also come from cultures with fierce family loyalties and deeply ingrained habits of corruption. By contrast, as Tocqueville argued, the American family was the seedbed of social cooperativeness and good citizenship.

Mr. Fukuyama shows his complete ignorance of the real dimensions of the immigration problem in his sappy comments about illegal aliens. For Mr. Fukuyama, illegal immigrants hanging out on street corners looking for day labor are a manifestation of the “family values” that made America, and should be celebrated. Tell that to the residents of Orange, California, where Mexican illegals are living 30 people to a house and are destroying the fabric of the community. Or tell it to the beleaguered residents of Los Angeles, who rush indoors before sundown on July 4th because the Mexican illegals in Los Angeles—doubtless in an outburst of family values—celebrate American Independence Day by firing guns in the air. Yet Mr. Fukuyama, in a fit of PC-speak, smears conservative Republicans as “nativist” for advocating effective border enforcement in the 1992 Republican platform.

Mr. Fukuyama approvingly cites the free-market economist Julian Simon’s ridiculous canard that current levels of immigration are not “inordinately high by historical standards.” Anyone with the slightest knowledge of immigration history knows that these so-called “historical standards” of Simon’s are derived from one or two decades of record-high immigration at the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, the high influx of that period created intense social and political upheavals that were only laid to rest by the severe immigration restrictions of 1921 and 1924. The illogic (not to mention the dishonesty) of presenting that singular period in American immigration history as typical—even as a guide for all future immigration policy—should be too obvious to require further comment.

Lawrence Auster
New York City

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To the Editor:

In “Immigrants and Family Values,” Francis Fukuyama’s real purpose is clear: he wants to derail any serious discussion of our nation’s future immigration policy. He calls it a “waste of time and energy.”

Mr. Fukuyama tries to assure us that, despite a breakdown in traditional values among Americans, today’s immigrants possess all the old ideals that made America great: work hard, cheap, and want better things for the children. . . .

Unlike Julian Simon, who calls for unlimited immigration, Mr. Fukuyama uses no numbers—none at all. He fails to mention that the U.S. will take in twice as many immigrants in 1993 alone as came during the entire colonial era.

If immigration is so high that it literally overtakes the anchor population, how can we reasonably expect the latest immigrants willingly to subordinate their political and cultural ideas to our own? . . .

Mr. Fukuyama says we should “force” immigrants to assimilate. How? By what means? Through “modern pop and consumer culture,” periodic bribes, or physical force? And if they are already bringing with them the tools to be a part of the Gemeinschaft (community), then why must they be forced to assimilate at all? His discussion reveals the typical flaws of a social scientist who tries to analyze immigration without any understanding of its underlying policy, history, or law. By avoiding any description of how different immigrants arrived here in the past (which often is a determinant of post-arrival success or failure), he feels free to embark on utopian character references on behalf of twenty million immigrants.

But all that is secondary. Mr. Fukuyama’s objective, rather, is to derail any serious discussion among conservatives about who should enter this country, on what terms, and by what rules. This will absolve the neoconservatives from engaging in any nasty immigration-related debates.

Dan Stein
Federation for American
Immigration Reform—FAIR
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Thank you, thank you for Francis Fukuyama’s article. It crystallizes what I have been trying to say to my Republican pro-family friends. The immigrants are not crawling under fences and across the desert so that they can get NEA grants to create homosexual pornography. They are coming here for our historic economic and political blessings, blessings which we natives seem to want to throw away. . . .

Mr. Fukuyama could have mentioned the 1920’s, when the Republican party . . . turned nativist and lost the children of the immigrants of that day to the Democrats and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Republicans have had to make the greatest efforts to win them back. The world we live in now, because of the immigrants and for other reasons, is more like the early years of this century than like the 50’s and 60’s. Republicans and conservatives will not doom themselves by choosing traditional values. They will doom themselves if they choose nativism. . . .

Howard Ahmanson
Irvine, California

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To the Editor:

While reading Francis Fukuyama’s article, I was overcome with a feeling of elation. Mr. Fukuyama discussed both sides of the issue very cogently and pointed out that the myth that third-world immigration is a threat to family values is false. . . .

I am saddened when it dawns upon me that some people feel superior to others. . . . Perhaps the few individuals who feel this way should review the foundations of the United States as expressed in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. . . .

One hopes Mr. Fukuyama’s article will awaken other Americans as well.

Kalpita Patel
Chicago, Illinois

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To the Editor:

. . . Surely Francis Fukuyama is correct in stating that the central issue in the immigration question is not one of trying to keep the newcomers out, but rather hinges on the larger dilemma of assimilation itself. Whether, in his words, “there is enough to our Western, rational, egalitarian, democratic civilization to force those coming to the country to absorb its language and rules. . . .”

And although he did not take it upon himself to answer that question directly in his article, the reply, as revealed by events in our country over the past 25 years, has to be a definite if qualified no. For all the merits of our Western civilization, it is certainly not enough, in and of itself, . . . to present much of an attraction these days to anyone, save for some desiccated old-line liberals.

Even among current liberals of the reenergized New Left—the very people who have carried these Enlightenment precepts of rationalism, liberty, and egalitarianism to their ironically dark extremes of radical feminism, forced quotas, and a wholesale retreat from the very notions of objective values, authority, and merit—this platform inspires only a partial allegiance. . . .

The problems of nihilism and dissociation . . . that we encounter today are debilitating to our society at all levels. And since these problems are fundamentally cultural, they cannot be solved from either side of the political spectrum. What is needed is a purification and renewal involving our hearts, souls, and spirits, as well as our minds. . . .

By this measure, it is our current majority culture that needs to do the assimilating and take in those healthier influences that can help us to break this impasse. And even if it is ultimately a spiritual problem, the answer must take root on the practical and material level where our daily lives are lived. So if our regeneration does not begin with how we approach the issue of work, it must certainly make its presence felt there. And it is here I feel that neoconservatives (if they wish to make a contribution to this American renaissance beyond the routine pillorying of the permissive ideology of the Left) will have to come to terms with their own dark little secret: that in making a legitimate defense of free-market capitalism, there is often the refusal to confront the destructive aspects of our present speculative and consumer-driven economy. . . .

In this sense, our economy and business climate as presently construed are also part and parcel of America’s decline, along with the corrosive immorality of the Left. And to right our course we need to assimilate—both from our own repressed republican traditions and from the present successes of the Japanese and East Asian economies in general—those virtues that can help rehabilitate the work ethic. . . . This will be no mean feat, since many of us are still fighting the last war, and would rather flay a vanquished socialism than face up to the full measure of our present difficulties. However, unless we meet that challenge, the direction of our historic decline is clear: as clear as the almost 400-percent decline in the value of our currency relative to the Japanese yen over the last 30 years, and the more than 100-percent decline in its worth over the last ten. . . .

Leonard Bakker
Berkeley, California

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Francis Fukuyama writes:

Senator Orrin Hatch obviously knows his own positions on immigration better than I do, and I apologize if I misrepresented them. I am very glad to know that he believes that immigration “enriches and strengthens American society, both economically and culturally.”

While I disagree with various aspects of Peter Brimelow’s argument, I think he should be commended for bringing up the cultural issue raised by immigration, not through innuendo but in an explicit and thoughtful way. But his arguments about the shifting racial and ethnic character of the United States (declining from 90-to 75-percent white between 1960 and 1990) do not scare me the way they do him. The category “white” is a very strange and expansive one, used by the Census Bureau to designate anyone who is neither black nor Hispanic. This includes Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Italians, Poles, Jews, Irish, Croats, and, in many census studies, Asians and Middle Easterners as well. The great dilution of our original Puritan Anglo-Saxon culture and ethnic base happened long ago, as turn-of-the-18th-century fears of German immigration, or Know-Nothing attacks on Irish immigration, or early-20th-century fears of Jewish and Italian immigration testify. Wasps for several decades have constituted only one-twentieth of the population of New York City, a figure that might once have caused panic but now is scarcely noticed.

The fact that all these different groups, which in Europe were culturally quite distinct, are now lumped together as “white,” is testimony to the flexibility and universality of that original Wasp culture. I don’t know whether the Irish, Jews, or Italians were less visible as minorities when they arrived than are Latinos today. And provided—and this is admittedly a big “if”—we do not destroy that assimilation engine through misguided multiculturalist policies, there is no reason why those Latinos will not be counted as “whites” themselves in a generation or two.

On the other hand, Mr. Brime-low and other critics of immigration have raised some very valid points about serious problems in our current immigration policy. It is crazy, for example, that the courts have extended educational, welfare, and other benefits to noncitizens. Welfare benefits, in particular, hurt the very groups they are meant to help by encouraging dependency; that is the only reason I can think of to explain the relatively poor performance of Puerto Ricans as compared to other Latino immigrant groups.

Michael Lind, Mr. Brimelow, and Lawrence Auster all make a similar point—namely, that strong family values alone do not constitute a “culture,” and that there are many other important cultural traits as well, such as beliefs about education, the work ethic, self-reliance, attitudes toward authority, and the like that determine an immigrant group’s ultimate assimilability.

This I concede to be true, and in this respect I am not trying to romanticize Latinos. It is quite clear that present-day immigrants will vary greatly in the rate at which they assimilate and rise economically. It is unlikely, for example, that Latinos are going to do nearly as well as German-, Jewish-, or Chinese-Americans before them.

It is probably appropriate to compare present-day Mexican immigrants to the several million southern Italians of peasant background who flooded into the United States in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This wave of Italian immigrants came with less than ideal cultural baggage: many did in fact suffer from what Edward Banfield (as cited by Mr. Lind) called an “amoral familism” that retarded mobility and educational achievement. Italians, like Mexicans today, had higher rates of truancy, crime, and educational failure than other immigrant groups; they had a knack for organized crime; and their integration into American society was much slower and more painful than for German or Jewish immigrants. Many, moreover, planned not to become U.S. citizens but to return to Italy. And yet today Italian-Americans rank higher than “native” Anglo-Saxons in terms of per-capita income and other measures of socioeconomic success. (Indeed, by most measures Anglo-Saxons rank only above the Irish among European immigrant groups.) Who would argue in retrospect that our country would be better off had we kept these “amoral-familist” Italians out, back in the 1890’s? I see no reason why Mexican-Americans should not follow the Italian trajectory, with the caveat that they, unlike the Italians, will be disadvantaged by misguided welfare policies and bilingual education.

On a somewhat smaller point, Mr. Lind, who is usually a careful reader of manuscripts (my own, in the past, included), should have noted that I stated clearly in my article that if you adjust for income level, the rates of single-parent families for whites and Latinos are very similar. Both are considerably lower than for blacks at the same income level, and if you factor out the troubled Puerto Rican community, Mexicans and Cubans have lower single-parent family rates than whites.

I appreciate Howard Ahmanson’s comments and those of Kal-pita Patel; the same cannot be said of Lawrence Auster or of Dan Stein, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). It does not surprise me that more immigrants will enter the U.S. in 1993 than in the entire colonial era; in 1790 the total population of the United States was only 3.9 million people. With the exception of the quality of our national leadership, everything—from immigration to GNP to the deficit—is greater today than it was then. On the other hand, the rate of immigration over the past decade is not substantially higher in either absolute or relative terms than it was in the years between 1880 and 1923. Mr. Auster makes the correct point that this period was a rather anomalous one in our national history with regard to the rate of immigration. But is he expressing regret that we let those people in back then? I am not one of those people who celebrates “diversity” for its own sake; indeed, many of our social problems stem from the fact that we are too diverse to feel a sense of community with one another. But critics of immigration like Mr. Auster evidence no appreciation for the positive contributions that each wave of immigrants has made to American life or realize that the old elites get tired and need periodic renewal from abroad.

In response to Mr. Stein’s question of how we can “force” people to assimilate, the answer is to do what we did routinely in the past: make immigrants learn English, force them to rely on themselves rather than on the government for economic advancement, reverse recent trends toward bilingualism and multiculturalism in the public-school system, and restore the idea that our rational, universalistic democratic culture, while tolerant, is superior to the various particularistic cultures that immigrants bring with them. To achieve this will require a long, grinding campaign, part of the larger “culture war” to which Patrick Buchanan refers. Organizations like FAIR would achieve their objectives more readily by engaging these sorts of issues rather than lobbying for immigration quotas and more border police.

Finally, if I understand Leonard Bakker correctly, I would agree that there is a tension between contemporary capitalism and traditional conservative cultural values, a greater tension than most American (though not necessarily European) conservatives would admit. The tremendous engine of “creative destruction” represented by modern capitalism levels everything before it, not just industrial dinosaurs like IBM and Sears but neighborhoods, families, concepts of work, religious attachments, and the like. I would not go so far as Mr. Bakker in saying that this leaves nothing that would appeal in our current society except to a bunch of “desiccated old-line liberals”: I for one really like the fact that I can now own my own Sun work station, and I am sure that I would hate living in most traditional third-world societies where the bonds of community and morality are much tighter. But it is certainly legitimate to ask what we can do, in the context of such a capitalist society, to preserve some greater measure of community and moral obligation. In this respect, I think that observation of the traditional/modern synthesis that has been achieved in certain Asian societies might help us reclaim some of our own traditional pre-modern and pre-liberal cultural heritage.