Why We All Can’t Just Get Along
WSJ’s Henninger offers up his thoughts on the Death of Diversity:
Diversity was once just another word. Now it’s a fighting word. One of the biggest problems with diversity is that it won’t let you alone. Corporations everywhere have force-marched middle managers into training sessions led by “diversity trainers.” Most people already knew that the basic idea beneath diversity emerged about 2,000 years ago under two rubrics: Love thy neighbor as thyself, and Do unto others as they would do unto you. Then suddenly this got rewritten as “appreciating differentness.”
Force-marched? I believe the term is “frog-marched.” Is this some PC dodge to avoid offending … you know … Frogs?
Anyway, interesting read if only a cursory examination of the subject. A point Henninger doesn’t address, and the diversity nazis don’t like to dwell on as they dwell on what one should do, must do, could do, is whether cultural, ethnic separation, etc., is not some creation of evil white men but may stem from a hard-wired, primeval human distrust of the other. Or maybe a simple desire to do different things in different ways, with others who do same. (In my own case, as a misanthrope who prefers to have as little as possible to do with the same as with the other, I’ve transcended all of this.) Henninger’s suggestion is that middle-class assimilation is the panacea, though I’d suggest it is only a more effective and less coercive method, but hardly flawless and we’re a long way from those multi-cultural TV commercial social minglings of the races representing any kind of widespread reality. Persisting tensions amid relative prosperity and lawfulness here, and explosions of ethnic hatred and violence in what had been relatively quiet and intermingled places in recent decades, suggest a complexity that is likely to defy any simplistic explanation.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:11 am on Thursday, August 16, 2007
8 Responses to “Why We All Can’t Just Get Along”
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August 16th, 2007 at 11:10 am
I didn’t read the WSJ “piece” that closely, but this truism jumped out.
“The diversity ideologues …preferring to turn “diversity” into a political and legal hammer to compel compliance.”
“diversity” BS is kept alive and well every day from the university pulpit.
(In my own case, as a misanthrope who prefers to have as little as possible to do with the same as with the other, I’ve transcended all of this.)
:-)
August 16th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I once attended a university diversity training seminar (actually my boss was supposed to go, and he made me go in his place). It was conducted by a Chinese-American man and an African-American woman, both from San Francisco, and it was a day and a half of subtly coded white-bashing. I vowed never to attend another one. If people of all races and creeds can get along, great. But I won’t buy into the manurespeak ever again.
August 16th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
A little bipartisan ditty pokes fun at the extremes of both parties and goes: “Keep Democrats out of the boardroom and keep Republicans out of the bedroom”.
Fair enough, there is some truth in that. But free, comfortable people got too complacent and made the fatal assumption that seemingly innocuous parts of their lives were beyond the pale of the culture wars. Sensing an unguarded front, the Left has proceeded to embark on a Long March through every other room in the house. From telling us what to eat and drive and how much toilet paper to use and how to flush, to where our kids go to school and whether or not they should have homework. Indeed, they now presume to tell us how big the house itself should be (well, except for their own elites of course). And for the past 40 years under the gentle well meaning title of “diversity” they have even tried to tell us who we can work and socialize with and live next to. Yes, Republican politicians have acquiesed in this process as well, but the Left is the intellectual breeding ground for most social engineering initiatives. Like their biggest social engineering failure of all, the Soviet Union, this is bound to run aground on the shoal of human nature. The sooner the better.
August 16th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
“…the Left has proceeded to embark on a Long March through every other room in the house.”
I recently read this great Heinlein quote that…you can forget about all those labels, left, right, conservative, liberal, on and on…the world breaks down into those who want to control every aspect of your life and those who don’t.
From this perspective, The Left is no different from Islamists, both religions very much all about control of “the other”.
August 16th, 2007 at 5:51 pm
“The Left is no different from Islamists, both religions very much all about control of “the other”. ”
You said it tansaafl!
Whereas the right in this country is all about “live and let live.” The right is all about respecting privacy, allowing a free and open flow of information from the powers that be, respecting checks and balances, not trying to shove any sort of morality down peoples’ throats, fighting censorship and meticulously avoiding bending the facts in any way.
August 16th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
Most diversity advocates have one group they feel needs special attention–their own.
August 16th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
@ 4iraqisfuture:
Well said. Whenever I mention “diversity,” I always put it in quotation marks (sneer quotes) because what’s being peddled now isn’t true diversity. “Diversity” is a huge gloppy mix of white guilt, total control freak tendencies, and soft racism , wrapped in a thin phyllo dough of compassion and tolerance. And yes, the interests are not of different cultures and orientations: it’s a pure self-interest that says more about the person’s nosiness and meddling than it does the understanding of other cultures.
August 17th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
I would say that there are those people who seek power over nature, and those who seek power over people–especially those who have mastered power over nature. Diversity has nothing to do with it, aside from being one of those meaningless catch-words that can mean whatever is needed at the moment, meaningless because all objective meaning has been stripped from them.