Diversity Is Our Strength

 

“Diversity is our strength” has been a popular slogan in Canada for many years.

Is it true?

Afghanistan stands as the ultimate model of ethnic diversity. “Afghanistan's 2004 Constitution cited Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkman, Baluch, Pashaie, Nuristani, Aymaq, Arab, Qirghiz, Qizilbash, Gujur, and Brahwui ethnicities; Afghanistan has dozens of other small ethnic groups.” (CIA World Fact Book)

Another diverse nation was the old Yugoslavia, with roughly comparable populations of Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Slovenes, Albanians, Hungarians, Montenegrins and Macedonians.

Another was the old Austro-Hungarian Empire; one might also cite the Balkans generally.

Iraq is diverse: Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, Turkmen, Assyrians, Mandaeans.

In all these examples, diversity does not seem to have been their strength. Instead, it hindered development, made these places relatively ungovernable, and led to bloodshed. Diversity was and is their weakness.

Diversity is a strength only in the context of more fundamental unity. America has been successful, because it had a powerful mainstream, and the motto was e pluribus unum. Immigrants intentionally shed their home culture by coming. Other, successfully diverse countries, like Singapore, India, or the UK, feature one overwhelmingly dominant ethnic group and culture. And even they have had their problems: Singapore was thrown out of Malaysia for being too Chinese, India underwent the holocaust of partition, and there is ongoing trouble Kalistani Sikhs and Tamil Tigers; and the UK underwent the Irish wars of separation and, as recently as the nineties, the Ulster troubles.

Unity is strength; diversity is good for choice of restaurants.

Multiculturalism, as an official policy, is suicidal.

Diversity is Not Our Strength

 

Yesterday in Saint John, there were two opposing demonstrations scheduled: the second One Million March for Children, protesting sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools, and “Love is Louder than Hate,” demanding sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools. All over Canada, there are large demonstrations protesting the genocide of Jews by Hamas in Israel, and competing demonstrations protesting the genocide of Arabs by Israel in Gaza. And this on top of the longstanding demonstrations for and against abortion.

Opposing demonstrations are not in themselves alarming. But these positions seem irreconcilable. There seems to be no room for calm debate or compromise. After all, to the one side, it looks like the other side is committing genocide. To one side, it looks like the other is trying to harm their children. 

It looks like civil war is coming inevitably closer all the time, and seems the necessary ultimate result. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Sooner or later, here or somewhere, competing demonstrations are going to clash violently, there will be a body count, there will be calls for vengeance, and the fighting will spread. One thinks of “Bleeding Kansas.”

The underlying problem is that we have lost or abandoned all our shared values or principles. Any society needs shared values to function: some underlying set of shared premises from which to argue and eventually come to an agreement. We used to all agree, or nearly all agree, on Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. Now a large portion of the population no longer do.

The only way to prevent a civil war is either a wholesale return to these values, or general adoption of some new set of shared premises. Marxism offered one, based on material progress and “dialectical materialism”; but, leaving aside its philosophical flaws, Marxism has surely by now been discredited in practice. Bad things happen wherever it is tried. Nazism offered one, a new morality based on the Theory of Evolution; but I think we can agree that did not turn out well. Islamism is one current candidate; but the state of the Muslim world does not inspire confidence.

I vote for a return to Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. To be clear, that means restrictions on abortion, absolute preference for Christian and Jewish over Muslim immigration, and no mention of sexual orientation or gender ideology in the schools.

Diversity R Us

 

If the political term “diversity” actually meant “diversity,” I would be the ultimate diversity hire. Like many whose ancestors have been in Canada for some time, I am diverse ethnically in my own being. Some of my genes, are Irish, some Scottish, some English, some French, some Flemish, some Mohawk. My cousins and in-laws have Indian cards.  I have no known African blood, but because of my Irish blood, most African-Americans are probably distant cousins. There is a reason so many American blacks have Irish surnames.

I am culturally as well as genetically diverse. To begin with, Canadian culture is a melting pot of elements from all over the world. I grew up in NDG, an immigrant neighbourhood in a bilingual city. I went to school with kids whose parents were from Italy, who spoke Italian at home, or from Poland, or Latin America. The kids on my block were one generation removed from Poland, Greece, Lithuania, the Ukraine. One of my best friends in high school was from India, one from Greece. My first girlfriend’s parents were from Latvia. My first wife was born and raised in Pakistan, and my second in the Philippines.

I do not think this is so unusual for a Canadian. 

As an adult, I have also lived in Asia for almost thirty years, in China, Korea, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates. I have studied non-Western cultures and the classics of Asia at the doctoral level. I have published on Hinduism in India, and on Buddhism in Korea. I have lectured the Hadassah Society on Judaism.

Yet, according to modern political usage, I do not count as “diverse.” Apparently, that has only to do with the colour of my skin, which is rather pale. Instead, government and businesses hire people with little knowledge of the world, with little experience of cultures other than their own, often little or no interest in cultures other than the one they grew up in. And little aptitude for living with people from other cultures. And they hire them in the name of “diversity.”

More evidence that the world is mad.

Pandemonium

Diversity is our strength.

Or so we are told.

Common sense suggests that unity is at least as important. Diversity is more like friction: energy dissipated without direction. Chaos is the ultimate diversity.

Granted that I love the diversity of the Catholic Church: the thought of people all around the world worshipping as one.

But then, it is not the diversity I love, is it? It is the act of deliberate unity. The old American motto, “E Pluribus Unum,” similarly celebrates a movement to unity, not diversity: “out of many, one.” One might as well say, “out of lead, gold.” “Out of manure, flower.” Diversity is the given, unity the ideal.

The liberal goal of equality is a call for unity: the idea is to treat all men the same.

The medieval scholastics considered unity one of the transcendental values, the ultimate goals of human existence.

So why this new and pressing desire for diversity? Very new in the idea that diversity is to be preserved and celebrated.

A thought occurs. Unity is equivalent to purity, and purity to morality. Sir Galahad said,
“My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.” Our prime directive, Jesus said, is to “love God with your whole heart.”

The devil, conversely, literally means diversity: the word comes from dia-bol, to set apart. Devils are multiple by nature: "pandemonium."

We are dealing with something diabolic.

The subtext to this emerging celebration of diversity, I suspect, is that it releases us from obligations to do what is right. We get to act at random, and nobody can object. That’s “diversity.”

The idiom “to hell in a handcart” comes to mind.

Diversity in the Arts

Pauline Johnson recites.

An acquaintance runs what is billed as “Toronto’s most diverse poetry reading series.”

Proposing a poetry journal to another friend, he asks, “what about diversity?”

Leaving aside larger issues, there is a special problem with calling for diversity in the arts. Because diversity in the arts is automatic.

This is so for at least two reasons. To begin with, novelty—diversity—is of entertainment value. Accordingly, anyone whose background or experience is out of the mainstream, or has not previously been heard, has a built-in market advantage. Why did Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Italy, or on some remote island, or anywhere other than England? People want to hear about lives and places other than their own.

Secondly, art is from suffering. Art is sublimated anguish. They say you need to have suffered to sing the blues. But this is equally true of all art.

As a result, art in itself is the outlet for the excluded and marginalized.

Speaking of the blues, the dominant art form in America is music, specifically popular music. And what group has always dominated American popular music—since at least the early nineteenth century? The blacks, the Africans, the folks hauled over as slaves. Almost all American musical styles are African in essence. In the old days, to make it with an audience, performers who were not black had to do it blackface.

There are a few styles that are not African: country, bluegrass, cowboy music. These come from the Scots-Irish living in the Eastern hills, poor, remote, and forgotten. These come from the defeated, impoverished South, not the urban power centres of the North. Add some Hispanic influence to the Scots-Irish to make cowboy music.

Put it together, and you get an accurate map of the history of social exclusion in the United States.

Now turn to the UK: the dominant art form there has been literature. Who has dominated English literature for centuries? The “Celtic fringe.” The actively oppressed Irish in particular, next to them the Scots, next to them the Welsh. If a prominent author turns out instead to be English, you can almost put money on it that he is Catholic. The socially excluded fringes.

And so it goes. Start tinkering with that in the name of “diversity” instead of quality, and whatever you think you are doing, you are promoting the privileged over the oppressed.

Ethnic or immigrant voices have always been prominent, indeed dominant, in English Canadian literature: Mordecai Richler, Brian Moore, Robert W. Service, Stephen Leacock, Pauline Johnson, Irving Layton, A. M. Klein. What are you accomplishing, then, by insisting on skin tints instead of quality?

You might ask, here, what about women? Surely women at least have been excluded in the past from the arts?

They have not.

In the US, while they might have been at a disadvantage in the corporate world, women have long been as prominent as men in popular music.

In Britain, and in English literature, my own research is anecdotal, but it is confirmed by others who have done the leg work: women are very well represented in Victorian literary publications.

If we are unaware of this, it is because writings by male authors are on average better remembered over time.

Is this prejudice? If so, it is a prejudice that has grown, rather than declined, in modern times.

There is a simpler explanation. To create something for the ages requires more than mere competence. It requires genius.

There are more male than female geniuses. This can be accounted for by evolutionary biology, but aside from that, it is simply so. It is consistent in IQ testing.

So there seems to be no case for imposing racial or sex quotas in the arts.

In practical terms, what the current call for “diversity” has done is drastically reduced diversity.