Diversity is our strength. Well yeah, if we’re talking about an evolutionary strategy for the perdurance of a species. And yeah, to some extent if we’re talking about the perdurance of a polity. We need some people who are good at this, others good at that, and maybe a few not good at anything at all, so the rest of us can earn our creds by looking after them.

We need diversity of opinions about this, where the ‘this’ are things that require deliberation, like whether to go to war, what taxes to put on milk and on cigarettes, whether the Holy Spirit proceedeth from the Father and the Son or from the Father alone, and so on. But we don’t want diversity of that, where ‘that’ are things like the language we all speak, or uptake to a common set of mores, like covering your mouth when you cough, or to a common moral code, like queueing, or to a common political understanding, like returning a found wallet to its rightful owner, and so on. To all the things that make it possible for us to live together.

But yes to diversity in the things that make it possible to live together well, like diversity in music, in cuisines – well, except for haggis – in what we each find sexually attractive, or fun to do, and so on. But the idea that we need cosmetic diversity, be it gender or skin colour or sexual appetite in research or the professoriate or the workplace or the board room, isn’t just false. It’s downright counter-indicated.

What we need in universities are people who know their shit, full stop. And shit doesn’t come in genitalia, skin colour, or sexual orientation. And what we need in the workplace, be it on the factory floor or further up the ladder is camaraderie. People who understand each other, people who can share a joke, people who like to work together, because they share a common small-c culture. And that tends to come with commonality of gender or colour or sexual orientation. Pick whatever measure of productivity you like, the stats will be the same. Homogeneity produces the goods.

Is that the only measure of good social policy? Of course not. Another is what’s (albeit improperly) called social justice, though we can call it that if it just means upward, downward, and lateral social mobility. Yes it’s hard for a woman to break into a profession that’s been traditionally male, or for whitie to make it as a professional basketball player, or for anyone other than a Sikh to get a job at the airport.

To say you can’t play because, well, you can’t, is one thing. To say you can’t play because you’re not allowed to is to deny you’re even a player. I get that. So we have to find an equilibrium between these two equally laudable desiderata. We both don’t want your plane to crash. You want the job seeing to it it doesn’t. I want to have a beer with my co-worker up in the tower after work. You don’t drink.

Sometimes – maybe most of the time – nobody’ll be unhappy. Sometimes at least somebody will be. One way to make that somebody just a tad less unhappy is not to accuse him of bigotry or, from the other side, of playing her race card. We’re all bigots. And we all play the cards we’re dealt. On that score there’s no diversity. It’s the one commonality we share. Let’s acknowledge it, give a shrug and a chuckle, and move on.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: camaraderie, homogeneity, morals, mores, political, queueing, strength in diversity