FIGHTING FOR DIVERSITY? Who Are We kidding?
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Please contact Jay B. Gaskill, attorney at law, via e mail at law@jaygaskill.com
Imagine, if you will, appealing to “blood, sweat and tears” in defense of civilization to the “crystals and aroma” spiritual hedonists crowd….
FIGHTING FOR DIVERSITY?
Who are we kidding?
By
Jay B. Gaskill
“Diversity” is a failure as a unifying social norm. Its advocates cannot really explain why homogeneous cultures (which can and often are pan-racial in origin) tend to be more law abiding, and why the large scale injection of radically different cultures into a pre-existing mono-culture tends to cause -- even under the best of conditions - a breakdown of the social capital of mutual trust relationships and leads to an increase in crime and social conflict.
[Evidence for this observation abounds. Consider the crime surge in the Netherlands; this is a social experiment-in-real-time.]
“Diversity” carries a high social cost when it doesn’t come with shared core values. A common cultural ethos promotes civility and mutual aid, especially when it is explicitly morally grounded. [Note: All functioning cultures are at least implicitly morally grounded.]
The Enlightenment promised a pan-tribal common culture that never really materialized - especially in the French version - because the deeper human commonalities are a bottom up achievement, not the product of top down impositions.
Tolerance of everything - except intolerance for tolerance of everything – inevitably mutates into “nihilism-lite”.
Civilization is founded on the bedrock of agreed norms that apply within its boundaries and without.
What is called “diversity” in the “post-modern sense” (read post-Enlightenment) is the doomed attempt to impose common “values” (actually a form of amoral tolerance) and a common “diversity culture” (really the worship of value neutral personal autonomy) without paying any respect to those deeper normative referents (I’m thinking of Judeo-Christianity’s underlying moral precepts, for example) on which any working civilization is necessarily founded.
The accommodation of individual autonomy, without more, does not form the deeper moral foundation needed for a natural, bottom up emergence of a culture of kindness and mutual respect, and the more explicit moral injunctions upon which any free civilization can be founded and defended.
Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine that we face a great threat to the very existence of civilization, itself, the threat of an impending Dark Age. [This is not a stretch in any post WW I era, really, and it is an obvious concern in the current decade.]
Now imagine, if you will, that you must make an appeal like Churchill made in WW II, asking for a pledge of “blood, sweat and tears” in defense of our civilization.
Imagine having an audience of reasonable, morally serious persons.
Now imagine making the same pitch to the crystals and aroma crowd of spiritual hedonists, or to the pampered narcissists who inhabit the spas, clubs and “self-fulfillment” parlors of the world.
I rest my case.
This is why I am personally persuaded that Judeo-Christianity, and its deeper humanist derivatives that are founded in essentially the same values, together with the forms of traditional Buddhism that are rooted in moral principle, form the best available and most powerful pan-tribal moral foundation that has yet emerged in the human family – all the obvious sectarian differences accounted for.
I believe this assertion is empirically defensible, all ideology aside. And I believe that all too few of us, at this critical moment in history, actually “get it”.
JBG
