Diversity becomes code for lack of merit

Daniel Henninger:

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."

George Bernard Shaw is said to have demurred from the Golden Rule. "Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you," Shaw advised. "Their tastes may not be the same." No such voluntary opt-out is permissible in our time. The parsons of the press made diversity into a secular commandment; do a word-search of "diversity" in a broad database of newspapers and it might come up 250 million times. In the Supreme Court term just ended, the Seattle schools integration case led most of the justices into arcane discussions of diversity's legal compulsions. More recently it emerged that the University of Michigan, a virtual Mecca of diversity, announced it would install Muslim footbaths in bathrooms, causing a fight.

Now comes word that diversity as an ideology may be dead, or not worth saving. Robert Putnam, the Harvard don who in the controversial bestseller "Bowling Alone" announced the decline of communal-mindedness amid the rise of home-alone couch potatoes, has completed a mammoth study of the effects of ethnic diversity on communities. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities. Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other. "Social capital" erodes. Diversity has a downside.

Prof. Putnam isn't exactly hiding these volatile conclusions, though he did introduce them in a journal called Scandinavian Political Studies. A great believer in the efficacy of what social scientists call "reciprocity," he wasn't happy with what he found but didn't mince words describing the results:

"Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television." The diversity nightmare gets worse: They have little confidence in the "local news media." This after all we've done for them.

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There is much more.

While diversity has become a code word for lack of merit, it is an insult not aimed at its victims who are flaying around out of their league, but the barb is aimed at the liberals who put them in untenable positions. When you look at the disaster that has occurred in public education in some cities you see the Peter Principal on steroids with whole administrations pushed into higher and higher levels of incompetence. They are permitted continue their downward spiral for fear of being criticized for being anti diversity. Thus our supreme court is forced to waste time listening to people argue for the benefits of long bus rides for children so they can sit next to someone from a diverse background while neither is being held accountable for learning. It is as though the proximity experience will ooze knowledge into its participants.

Clarence Page looks at the same writers works and finds an upside to diversity. My point is different from both writers. In fact I live in a diverse community and get along better with my neighbors than the study would suggest. What I am concerned about is the forced diversity that pushes people into positions for which they are not qualified or ready and prevents corrections to this perversity by implying that those who notice are racist.

Thomas P.M. Barnett has more thoughts on diversity and the study in question. He notes assimilation is not instant. I think it should be facilitated instead of mandated.