Thursday, December 1, 2022

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


12 comments:

Peter B said...

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.

You're in good company. Shortly after Soviet intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky defected to the West in the late 1930s (prompted by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the subsequent murder of a colleague by the Party,) anti-Communist journalist Isaac Don Levine introduced him to Whittaker Chambers.

Krivitsky: Is the Soviet Government a fascist government

Chambers: You are right, and Kronstadt was the turning point.

(In the Kronstadt Rebellion, the sailors of the Russian Baltic Fleet—having given critical aid to the Bolsheviks—realized their terrible error and rose up to correct it. The rebellion was suppressed by Trotsky's forces at Lenin's orders.)

Landroll said...

The wokies are going to put you on their poop list! Pretty clear view of why initials of Diversity, Inclusion, Equity provide the watchword of our time. I pray that some or some can turn our society around or it will be the end.

Tsgt Joe said...

Working in Social services I heard a lot of "diversity is our strength". On numerous occasions I asked people to define what that meant to them, the answer was usually something along the lines of everyone doing their own thing.
I never made any headway in pointing out that diversity of perspective and experience might be helpful in finding solutions to agreed upon common problems and goals but otherwise it was divisive.

CDH said...

To butcher the old saying/maxim about enemies...Diversity for the sake of diversity gives you diversity, nothing more and nothing less.

James said...

Interesting thing about fascism, the two biggest proponents were originally communists. Hitler was an official in the Bavarian Communist Party immediately after WW1 and prior to WW1 Benito was an active communist. Apparently the failure of Communism to rouse the working classes from Nationalism in the conduct of WW1, convinced some communists that they needed to move from an international movement to a national one. Certainly a great many of the social policies of the fascists were similar to the communist ones. The Germans called themselves National Socialists. Goebbels referred to "our socialism " right up to the end. The conflict between the communists and fascists can thus be seen as religious groups fighting heretics.

JaimeInTexas said...

Diversity + Proximity = War

JaimeInTexas said...

“In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your country" implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.”

― Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Mind your own business said...

Diversity of ideas may be useful at the start of a problem-solving exercise, so long as the ideas aren't loony-tunes uninformed. But eventually they become like a team of horses all pulling in different directions, and are a hindrance.

Diversity of anything else is rarely helpful, except in rare circumstances tailored for such things. Cultural diversity may be interesting and exciting, but I suspect is sociologically fatal in the long run.

Old NFO said...

Not buying it...

Mind your own business said...

“In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your country" implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.” ― Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Mind your own business said...

Sorry Jaimein Texas ... didn't mean to steal your thunder ... I knew I'd seen the quote somewhere and thought it appropriate. Apparently I saw it here.

tsquared said...

“The truth is that diversity is strength. It’s a scientific fact.”

That would be a big NO. It is a fact that the best qualified provides the strongest strength.