The New Trinity: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

It’s the new Holy Trinity. Our bien pensant elites have latched on to a new trinity-- diversity, equity and inclusion. If you do not believe in them, our elites will make your life miserable. This means-- we are dealing with a new religion, one that has its own dogmas and that is willing to impose them on everyone. I make mention of this in order to emphasize that, the Enlightenment notwithstanding, we have certainly not overcome religious dogma. We just repackaged it.

Now, Sheldon Bart comes forth with some sound, sane and sensible thinking about diversity, equity and inclusion. (via Maggie’s Farm) he believes, quite correctly, that a society based on inclusion must also exclude some people. The same, he says, applies to making dinner. As for equity, it’s opposite is merit. If you want to include people who have not earned their way, you must exclude people who have earned their way. This produces resentment and disrespect. 

As Shelby Steele pointed out two decades ago, hiring for diversity undermines the value of the positions granted to anyone who even appears to be a diversity hire. Furthermore, when it comes to diversity, it is obviously not our strength. As famed Harvard historian Robert Putnam discovered, upon researching multicultural community life, the more diverse the community the less likely it is that people will socialize. The more diverse the community the more people are likely-- in his phrase-- to hunker down.

Anyway, the current Biden administration is all-in with diversity, equity and inclusion. The new defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, put it at the top of his to re-do list. So, how did this administration, with its diverse and highly co-ed military, do in Afghanistan?

Allow me a brief excursion through Bart’s thought, unimpeachable as it is.

First, he introduces the new trinity:

The politically correct write the three-word mantra “diversity, equity and inclusion” with capital letters and refer to it in acronym form as DEI. This is a distinction never accorded to such familiar triads as “duty, honor, country,” “faith, hope and charity,” or “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” You’ve never seen any of the latter set forth as DHC, FHC, etc. Despite having elevated its linguistic status, the acolytes of this political religion haven’t been thinking deeply about their Holy Trinity’s components.

Underscore the last part. The proponents of the new trinity are not quite at the level of Augustine and the other Church Fathers. America has dumbed down the intelligentsia to the point where most of her leading thinkers are barely literate and do not know how to think. Most of them do not even know how to use pronouns correctly.

If they did, they would have noticed the inclusion must involve exclusion. You cannot include everyone because it would render inclusion meaningless.

Start with “inclusion.” Realistically, exclusion is just as necessary, just as important as inclusion. This isn’t difficult to comprehend. If you’re preparing the ingredients for a chicken dinner, you’ll likely exclude whipped cream. If you want to learn Chinese (not a bad idea these days), you must exclude French from your studies. If you want to play baseball, you have to exclude those who lack the physical ability to play the game or the mental balance to engage in a collective activity in accordance with a certain set of rules. If not, you may be doing therapy, and that’s fine, but you’re not playing a competitive game of baseball, which has its own benefits.

Yes, indeed, you are either playing baseball or doing therapy. You cannot be doing both. And if you want to play baseball, you will choose the best players for your team. Of course, in the American media and the academy, where hiring is increasingly based on diversity, such is not the case. In today's culture most people would rather conduct their lives according to the rules of therapy than they would according to the rules of baseball. I mention the point in order to suggest that there is a reason why so many children tune out the culture in order to lose themselves in video games.

Bart continues:

We practice both inclusion and exclusion every day when we decide whom to hire, welcome into our circle of friends, or select as an intimate partner. Both as individuals and as a society, we strive to practice inclusion and exclusion based on merit, character, and capacity (MCC, if I may). And contrary to the howls of the hypersensitive, no one need apologize for that.

And then, on to equity, a rather ambitious attempt to make all American institutions look like America. Hiring on the basis of genetic attribute has never worked out well, especially when the basis was parentage, so one wonders why we imagine that it will work any better when the goal is as nebulous as equity:

Equity goes a step beyond inclusion. As a sociological talking point, it requires that all groups be represented relative to their percentages in the overall population. In practice, it really means allocating rewards to favored groups while withholding considerations from other people who earned them on the merits. Has a coherent argument ever been made to Asian-Americans parents why their most deserving children are deemed too over-represented to be admitted to Harvard, Stanford, or the Bronx High School of Science?

So, Asian children are being punished for being Asian. Some serious schools imagine that certain groups have test scores that are too high. They rectify the problem by docking group members. Obviously, this is all prejudicial, not on the basis of race, but on the basis of working hard and overachieving. 

As for the notion that all of America’s multiple cultures are going to live in peace and harmony, it is profoundly stupid. Beyond the Putnam research, Bart points out that the Eastern Europe, containing multiple ethnicities, were, after World War I, pure bedlam:

As usual in mortal affairs, grim reality failed to conform to utopian theory. The region to be aligned in accordance with the principle of nation-state-territory—the Baltics—was a bedlam of mutually loathing ethnicities formerly constrained to live within multinational, multicultural borders.

By May 1919, the New York Times counted sixteen limited wars flaring in the aftermath of the First World War--Poles vs Czechs, Austrians vs Yugoslavs, Germans vs Latvians, Hungarians vs Rumanians....

One cannot reasonably disagree with Bart’s conclusion.

Diversity has not historically been associated with peace and stability. Rather, increasing diversity is tearing our country apart. Diversity can be handled safely, but only by practicing inclusion and exclusion based on merit, character, and capacity, and emphasizing equality of opportunity rather than equity.