So much for diversity

 

Yesterday I saw an aside over at Sarah Hoyt's place:

Seen this weekend from a military desk pilot “The truth is that diversity is strength. It’s a scientific fact.” That’s about as scientific as the the idea that the sun circles the Earth or that the Earth “has a fever”.

Uh-huh.

I can't for the life of me think of any scientific evidence whatsoever that "diversity is strength".  Rather, the opposite appears to be true.  When an organism - whether animal, vegetable or mineral - multiplies, so that its component parts can work together and support each other (and, more importantly, crowd out any competing organisms), that organism generally becomes dominant in its environment.  It may need other organisms to survive, but it's top dog, so to speak, and they're tolerated solely because they're useful.

That's been understood by every human society since ancient times.  Remember the Roman Empire and its fasces?  The symbol has come down to us through many routes, and is today remembered largely through Italy's National Fascist Party under the late, unlamented Benito Mussolini.  It's the root of what we today refer to as fascism, although modern usage tends to refer to fascists as right-wing.  In reality, throughout most of history, groups of such persuasions have been left-wing;  more socialist than nationalist.  One could quite legitimately refer to the Bolsheviks in Tsarist Russia as being as much fascist as communist - their doctrines and dogmas contained much that would later resonate with Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy.

The motto or slogan of most powerful nations and movements has been that "unity is strength".  That was the motto of South Africa - ironically, a state characterized by the deliberate fragmentation of its majority Black population into tribes with their own "homelands", never recognized as such by the international community.  In that nation, it was seen by the ruling party as meaning "White unity is strength against Black majority rule" - although never expressed in those words, of course.  Inevitably, the result of deliberately eschewing a national identity in favor of a race-based identity led to the collapse of the racist government there.  Today, the country's business and political economy is in ruins as a result, because nobody ever took the time to inculcate a genuinely national unity and identity.  "Unity is strength" was honored far more in the breach than in the observance.

I saw this at first hand, living as I did through the years of South Africa's rolling civil war leading up to its first-ever democratically elected government in 1994.  Because the central government there had tried to force every tribe apart, pushing them into their own homelands and emphasizing their tribal rather than national identity, the inevitable push-back when that pressure was removed meant that every tribe wanted to rush together into the center, to have national unity rather than tribal diversity.  The fact that there was, indeed, much diversity that the subsequent national state refused to recognize or tolerate, meant that the resultant "unity" was only skin-deep.

Compare and contrast that to what happened when the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Soviet doctrine had been, for decades, to insist that all of its component "Soviet Socialist Republics" had to confirm to the guidance and diktats of the central government in Moscow.  Ethnic, religious and other differences were not just ignored, but suppressed (sometimes with extreme brutality).  Therefore, when the central authority collapsed, the component Republics flew apart from the center, each trying with might and main to emphasize its own cultural and national identity, and wanting to get as far away from enforced central authority as it could.  That led to chaos, and a great deal of instability.  From the perspective of a united Russia, such as exists (?) today, diversity has been anything but strength.

(If all that reminds you of Newton's Third Law of Motion, often expressed as "To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" . . . it should.  The Third Law appears to be as valid politically as it is in physics.)

In almost every diverse society in history, there was - at least initially - a unifying factor, a central belief or tenet or ethic around which every diverse element of that society could gather.  It might have been religious faith, or geopolitical power, or the need to provide for its members in the face of external dangers;  but there was always something to unite the people and the politicians.  Historically, when such a unifying factor ceased to exist or became largely ignored, the unity of that society also collapsed - slowly, perhaps, but inevitably.  As Robert Heinlein famously put it:

Roman matrons used to say to their sons: 'Come back with your shield or on it.' Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.

One might argue correlation versus causation there, but I think his core assumption is valid.  When people were no longer prepared to make serious, meaningful sacrifices to sustain their shared nation, that nation declined.

I think the late President John F. Kennedy's famous call encapsulates that viewpoint.

Tragically, no politician today echoes those words.  Instead, it's all about "identity politics", or blaming others for one's own failures, or siphoning off taxpayer dollars through corruption and malfeasance rather than seeing it as a duty to do one's job honorably, honestly and uprightly.

That's why "diversity is strength" is a lie.  We have nothing to unify us:  therefore, it's every man (or woman, or thing) for him/her/itself.  Only if we get back to the truth that "unity is strength", and find something around which we're willing to coalesce to form a genuinely national, unified coalition . . . only then will we once again have strength.

China knows this:  it's why President Xi over there has woven a cult of personality around himself.  Russia knows this:  it's why President Putin has lied, cheated and stolen power through machinations over decades, to make himself the indispensable center of everything the country does.  It's why American power has diminished, because the rest of the world sees the hollowness, the chaos at our center, with "every politician for himself".  They see a puppet President, senile, demented, unable to even change his own clothes without assistance, and they see our politicians holding him up as if he were a real national leader, and they know they're lying.  That's why America is no longer respected by anybody.

We no longer have a valid center around which to unite, and therefore we're fragmenting.  Those who until now have relied on alliance with us have come to realize this, and they're looking for new strengths, new allies, to ensure their own survival - because they're increasingly certain they won't find that in us.

Welcome to diversity!

Peter