To quote the world’s most controversial rocket scientist, I love Phil Rosenthal as much as a straight man can love another man, so I was excited to start watching the newest season of Somebody Feed Phil — a food-and-travel show on Netflix hosted by the man behind Everybody Loves Raymond.
Unfortunately my excitement took a hit during the opening monologue of the opening episode, in which Phil explains why he chose to visit Amsterdam:
People come for the charm, they come for the history; but besides a few local specialties, food has never been a big draw. But now, thanks to new chefs, updated traditions, and the influences of former Dutch colonies like Indonesia and Suriname, that is changing.
Ah. So Phil has gone to a place where, in his words, the food was historically crap but thanks to immigration is now edible — though whether something is lost if visiting the Netherlands means eating non-Dutch food is not mentioned.
Inter alia Phil takes us to a refugee centre, a mainstay of any food show, and preaches:
I feel like we have this idea of refugees, and some people think they’re going to ruin our place where we live. Until you meet them. Until you spend a tiny bit of time with them. Or maybe even share a meal with them.
You might ask, ‘How many refugees can we help?’ I’d say as many as we can.
This is a classic example of progressive logic: generalising from the particular rather than particularising from the general.
The refugees you meet round a dinner table in a centre dedicated to integration will almost certainly be pleasant: they are demonstrating a desire to learn about their host country and adopt its customs. But to assume that those ten people are representative of millions of people is a failure of modelling, all the more so nowadays when asylum seekers (for example in the UK) are increasingly likely to be young men from safe countries.
Europe as a whole has experienced the results of generalising from the particular. Angela Merkel’s experiment in anti-borders policy — allowing over a million Syrian refugees into Germany — has led to increased crime, more people on unemployment benefits, and the AfD becoming the most popular party. Sweden’s experiment in anti-borders policy has caused a little social democratic country to become Europe’s bomb capital.
This is not an anti-immigration argument per se, nor is it a guide on how to approach individuals. It is good practice, not to mention good manners, to treat the individual in front of you as an individual, who may be representative of no one other than himself. But when you’re dealing in policy abstractions, as Phil is, then it’s not enough to say, ‘X is nice and from Syria and therefore everyone from Syria will be nice and integrate brilliantly’. Progressives recognise this in other contexts, for instance when they deny that one bad experience with a member of a particular group can be extrapolated to all members of that group.
I suspect Phil’s purpose in visiting a refugee centre was to provide a counter-narrative to the pro-border trend among voters in the Netherlands. In 2023 Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party became the largest party in the Dutch parliament, fuelled by concerns around asylum seekers and immigration. Phil might think the Dutch should take as many refugees as they can, but the Dutch seem to feel like they’ve done their bit, taking over 200,000 in 2022 alone. Like all good progressives, Phil wants to tell them they’re wrong without understanding their experiences — he didn’t, I note, ask any Freedom Party voters why they’re concerned about asylum seekers.
Nor, I also note, did Phil tell the UAE to take more refugees when he visited Dubai. Perhaps he should have: in 2022 the UAE accepted fewer than 1,500 asylum seekers. There are no concerns about asylum seekers in Dubai because for all intents and purposes there are no asylum seekers. The input doesn’t exist so neither does the feedback.1
Nevertheless I will admit that I’m being unfair on Phil. I’m using him as a stand-in for progressivism. His Amsterdam episode was mostly about traditional Dutch restaurants, the refugee piece being one small section. He isn’t an aggressive ideologue; he’s what you get when progressivism is the dominant culture. I imagine Phil believes he should use his platform to do something ‘good for society’, and progressivism has filled out the concept of societal good for him. The irony is that Phil, a family man and a hardworking success, provides an example of societal good far greater than any pious sermon to camera could provide.
The overall lesson is that consequences have actions. If you don’t like the feedback, change the input. If you don’t like Trump, Brexit, Geert Wilders, the AfD, and so on, then stop doing the things that produce them in the first place. To campaign against politicians like Trump, or against pro-border sentiment generally, is to campaign against the feedback that progressive policies have caused, all of which leads to the doomloop we find ourselves in: progressives implement extreme policies, those extreme policies give rise to ‘intolerance’, progressives implement extreme policies to deal with ‘intolerance’, those extreme policies give rise to more ‘intolerance’, and so on till regime change.
Despite the preferred belief of many elite progressives, most people are fairly live-and-let-live. Voters tend to be tolerant of a small and controlled amount of immigration, particularly when the immigrants are culturally compatible or when they make visible efforts to integrate. If progressivism hadn’t adopted the most extreme version of itself the calls we now hear for regime change would go unheeded, the populist parties would be mostly unpopular, and the tensions many societies now have wouldn’t really exist, at least not in relation to immigration. Progressives could have had their dream of a peaceful multiethnic society, if only they had stopped progressing about forty years ago.
I am not suggesting Dubai is a good model.