Treating the Symptom, not the Cause

 

What a brouhaha about H-1B visas within the MAGA movement.  I think prompted by a post from Vivek:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

There is more to it, but you get the idea.

Now, the culture he and Elon and the tech wizards that have joined MAGA (do they really care about what working class Americans care about) is the culture of STEM, and I agree fully that this is an important culture for an industrialized, division of labor economy.

Of course, it isn’t the most important cultural element.  I have written about this probably more than any other subject at this blog.  Call it a Christian culture that lives by the natural law ethic and legislates based on natural rights.  With such a culture as the foundation, excellence in STEM and every other field is secured.

I don’t intend to turn this post into a complete review of natural law and natural rights.  Suffice it to say, a natural law ethic places happiness as the highest value – happiness, or beatitudo, better understood as fulfillment through other-regarding action.  Call it love, and see the Golden Rule for a shorthand description of this: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Natural rights are different: these are the rights an individual has based on his humanity: a right to his life and to his justly acquired property.  Laws should be based on this and only this, what is described as the non-aggression principle.  I have in the past greatly simplified what this means: don’t hit first, don’t take my stuff.  Do either, and there ought to be a law against it.

So, that’s enough about the culture that actually matters if Vivek and Elon and these other wizards of Silicon Valley want capable employees.  In other words, Vivek is right – the issue isn’t an innate IQ deficit.  Yes, east Asians present a higher IQ, but it isn’t as if Americans of Western European descent lack in any measure of intelligence.

Vivek is dealing with a symptom: attributing the lack of Americans capable in STEM due to some cultural deficit in Americans.  But this isn’t the cause.  The underlying cause is the disdain for this Christian culture of natural law ethics and natural rights law.

This disdain has brought us to celebrate the idea that 2 + 2 = 4 is a social construct, that race or gender are more important factors in higher education than academic capability, that race or gender are more important factors than performance in hiring practices.

This disdain has brought us to develop entire university degrees in the most useless and inane fields, leading many who would be far better off learning a trade to instead fall into $100,000 or more of four-year debt only to work at Starbucks.

This disdain has even brought the STEM fields to ignore reality and focus on trivialities or worse.

Conclusion

Vivek and Elon want to work on the symptom, but this won’t fix any problem that matters to Americans.  Work on the cause (don’t even insert the idea of natural law into it): make education meaningful again.  This can be done simply enough: turn off the US government spigot that funds higher education stupidity in curriculums and today’s version of diversity in admissions.