Thomas Sowell writes today in the Wall Street Journal on "diversity" and it's contribution to the difficulties in Iraq.
What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.
That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.
Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.
Despite much gushing about how we should "celebrate diversity," America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.
What Mr. Sowell identifies as the problem is the tendency of those who over-value "diversity" to emphasize the differences between peoples, differences that seem to be associated far too often with violence between those peoples. What that violence says is that the principle of "diversity" is often misunderstood.
Cultural diversity as we currently have in America should not be about identifying all of the different groups in America and tip-toeing around differences between their cultures and American society, but rather should be about inclusiveness in American Society due to our common "American-ness." Thus we do a disservice to immigrants when we give them the crutch of multi-lingualism far beyond what should be their need for such. We do Muslims a disservice when we abhor jokes and statements that offend their sensibilities when we allow, and even chuckle at, similar jokes and statements about Jews and Christians. And we do members of all groups a disservice when we give special consideration to one or another in employment situations.
What we should hope to have is a color- and culture-blind society, where expectations and responsibilities and opportunities are the same for all 300 million of us. Highlighting our differences is detrimental to that goal; instead we should be setting aside, even ignoring these differences. After all what matters is the "content of [our] character," no?
Mr. Sowell concludes:
But we can at least hope that the Iraq tragedy will chasten the hubris behind notions of "nation-building" and chasten also the pious dogmatism of those who hype "diversity" at every turn, in utter disregard of its actual consequences at home or abroad. Free societies have prerequisites, and history has not given all peoples those prerequisites, which took centuries to evolve in the West.
