What’s So Great About Diversity?

I recently ran across an article titled, “Diversity is Becoming a Form of Worship”.

It got me thinking: Is diversity even a value?

The question is a trap. If you say “yes”, then you’re along for the nauseating ride of today’s culture that everything and anything in life is good, so long as there’s diversity. Nazis are OK, as long as there’s diversity. White supremacists and rapists and killers are all good — so long as there’s diversity. Muslims are OK because they balance out the Christians, Jews and atheists. Who cares if their religion sanctions hatred and slaughter? Honesty and dishonesty are both good, so long as we have a diverse number of each. Clearly ridiculous!

Yet if you say “no” to diversity, you’re left implying that uniformity and conformity are the ideals, since they’re the opposite of diversity.

Notice what diversity and conformity have in common: Allegiance to somebody else’s standards. Instead of an objective standard that you’re prepared to defend — a standard of good, true or right — you are forced to go with everything that has already been served up over time.

When you opt for diversity as the central virtue, you escape responsibility for identifying and defending what’s objectively good, true and right. Instead of saying, “I like this option best, and this is why,” you can lazily claim, “I like all options, no matter what they are. I’m open-minded.”

Reality and reason are their own avengers. Why? Because if you sincerely try to adopt diversity as a standard, it will eventually bite you in the face. Since it’s absurd and impossible to endorse and accept everything and everyone simultaneously, your compassionate tolerance of diversity necessarily collapses into small-minded intolerance. For an example, look at the intolerance of today’s diverse-minded “progressives”. They tolerate nobody who disagrees with them, because they view dissenters as irrational, hateful and immoral. Oops…there went diversity!

Imagine going into a restaurant and saying, “I don’t care what I eat here. I don’t care if it’s good or bad. So long as there’s a diversity of menu items, that’s all I care.” Or going to a car dealership and saying, “I don’t care about which cars run, and are pretty, or which ones are pieces of junk. Just give me the car that has sold the least so I can contribute to the diversity of cars on the road.”

Imagine not caring about whom you marry, so long as there’s a balance of skin color, religious heritage, socioeconomic status and ancestral background in your marriage. What’s love got to do with it?

Those of us who love to be seen jumping on the diversity train regarding morality or human behavior never stop to think how ludicrous such a standard is when it comes to just about anything else.

We do not need diversity. We do not need conformity or similarity, either. All we need are truth, beauty, competence, love and actual, honest-to-goodness virtue. The quest for diversity took us away from any expectation there even is such a thing as virtue. And we wonder why society — by anyone’s observation — has become such a cynical, dour and frightening place.

It’s not diversity we need. It’s quality. And it’s all we ever needed.