For decades, discussions surrounding mass immigration into Western nations have largely been confined to two unproductive viewpoints. One perspective, which views culture as a superficial element and asserts the fundamental similarity of all human beings, suggests that immigrants primarily require sufficient time and opportunities to integrate. Conversely, the other attributes assimilation challenges to cultural values, patriarchal attitudes, or religious conservatism. Both approaches, however, exhibit an intellectual reluctance to delve deeper. What remains conspicuously absent from the prevailing discourse is an understanding rooted in developmental psychology and civilization theory. This framework offers significant explanatory power while avoiding genetic determinism and simplistic cultural explanations, yet it still presents genuinely uncomfortable truths.
A central insight, systematically elaborated by sociologist Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff, who leans upon Norbert Elias’s civilization theory and Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology, posits that human societies evolve through distinct stages of psychological and institutional development. Piaget identified the formal operational stage as the pinnacle of cognitive development, typically emerging in adolescence, in which individuals become capable of abstract reasoning, hypothetical thinking, and evaluating situations according to universal principles rather than immediate, concrete experience. Oesterdiekhoff’s provocative claim is that premodern peoples, as a general rule, did not reach this stage—remaining, in cognitive terms, at earlier levels of development characterized by magical thinking, egocentrism, and an inability to reason systematically beyond the tangible and the familiar. This assertion has nothing to do with race or immutable biological traits.
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