Further Thoughts on ‘Diversity’ and the Ritual Suicide of American Culture

Posted on | December 15, 2015 | 35 Comments

The previous post about Sam’s Club CEO Rosalind Brewer’s comments on corporate “diversity” was 900 words, which is but the tip of a vast iceberg of what I could say on this subject. Diversity is one of those “glittering generalities” — like Equality and Progress and Science — that function in public discourse as a sort of intellectual anesthesia, inducing a trance-like state in which we can be argued into accepting bad policy because any opposition could be characterized as a sin against these vague concepts. Rhetorical invocations of abstract ideals are a sort of counterfeit currency, a substitute for sound logic and sturdy facts, when we are talking about matters of policy that affect the real lives of flesh-and-blood people in a world where the potential consequences of foolish naïveté include War, Famine, Disease and Death.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will be only too happy to ride in shouting slogans of diversity and social justice, much the same way as Hitler took advantage of the slogan of peace. “Peace for our time,” as Neville Chamberlain called it after betraying Czechoslovakia at Munich, lasted less than a year before the Stuka bombers and Panzer divisions were unleashed against Poland. From the day on which Chamberlain proclaimed “peace for our time,” it took less than 21 months before the British army found itself surrounded at Dunkirk. Two weeks after that debacle, the Battle of Britain began, and soon bombs from Heinkels and Junkers were falling on England. “Peace for our time,” indeed.

You might think the lessons of history would teach people to be skeptical toward slogans as a substitute for sound policy, but the teaching of history has been hijacked and corrupted by ideologues in much the way journalism has been similarly hijacked and corrupted. The moral of history, as taught in American schools and universities, is the same as the moral of every story in the major news media: Vote Democrat.

What shall we say, then, of “diversity”? First, we must recognize that it is merely a slogan, which can be used to justify damned near anything in terms of public policy. About 20 years ago, a friend of mine remarked that liberals believe in diversity through homogenization, so that they will not be satisfied until we are all identical and interchangeable. It seems to be the goal of liberal policy to create “diversity” by eradicating every existing difference between individuals, thus to reduce us all to Standardized Human Units. This is their long-term plan, but in the short term, liberals insist that every institution and organization in society must be equally “diverse.” The perfect example of this idea, I think, was the 1996 Supreme Court ruling that decided that the all-male enrollment policy of Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional. Somehow, it seems, the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment has swallowed the entire Constitution, and this strange logic — which views the achievement of equality as the whole purpose of government — can be traced forward from the 1996 VMI decision to this year’s Obergefell decision making same-sex marriage the law of the land.

Once we accept slogans like “diversity” as a substitute for facts and logic, it becomes impossible to argue that all-male institutions serve a legitimate purpose, just as it becomes impossible to argue against same-sex marriage. Merely invoke the right slogans — Equality! Progress! Science! — and every possible objection is silenced, as critics are instantly stigmatized: Racist! Sexist! Homophobe!

Why is it, really, that we should care who is CEO of Sam’s Club? This is a private corporation, whose policies and personnel answer to a corporate board which, in turn, answers to stockholders whose capital is at stake in the business. One might say the customers of Sam’s Club should be considered, but the consideration of what the customers want is the job of the company’s employees, and of no concern to anyone else. You see, if the customers don’t like shopping at Sam’s Club, they can shop at Costco, and if they don’t like Costco, they can shop online via my Amazon Associates links (and I encourage them to do, as this generates revenue for me, the Greedy Capitalist Blogger).

Is my blog “diverse”? No, because I can’t afford the luxury of hiring the necessary quota of gay black men, Latina lesbians and transgender Asians to pass muster with the Supreme Court. Let’s face it, my existence violates the 14th Amendment — I’m a one-man system of discriminatory oppression — and it’s probably just a matter of time until I’m shut down by the Department of Home Security or some kind of United Nations tribunal. So you better start shopping those Amazon links while it’s still legal. How long will it be before we’re forbidden to commit such a Thought Crime as questioning the logic of “diversity”?

In practice, “diversity” is often a very different thing than the idealistic abstraction its intellectual proponents demand. Intellectuals inhabit places where profit is not a motive and where the normal supply-and-demand forces of economics are skewed by non-market incentives such as the government subsidies to colleges and universties that keep the Higher Education Bubble inflated. Consider the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University:

Drawing on history, literature, cultural studies, social science, and science, it offers interdisciplinary perspectives from which to study the diversity of human experience. Gender — the social meaning of the distinction between the sexes — and sexuality — sexual identities, discourses, and institutions — are studied as they intersect with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and transnational movements.

What, if anything, does this actually mean? Why do students at Yale (annual tuition $47,600) pursue these “interdisciplinary perspectives”? Consider the chairwoman of this department at Yale:

Margaret Homans has practiced feminist (and, more recently, queer) literary criticism in fields ranging from Romantic poetry to the contemporary novel. Her goal has been to mediate between sometimes polarized views of human identity: is gender the core or essence of any human subject, or is gender mutable and socially and culturally constituted? In her courses and publications on Victorian, modern, and contemporary literature, she has focused on women writers who explore questions of gender, sexuality, power, and identity. Her current research is on narratives about adoption, which raises questions about what constitutes the human in the contexts of race, ethnicity, nationality, and class as well as gender and sexuality.

So the practice of “feminist (and, more recently, queer) literary criticism” has qualified Dr. Homans not merely to teach at Yale (where the average professor’s salary is reportedly $198,365) but to be chairwoman of an entire department devoted to studying the ways in which “gender” and “sexuality . . . intersect with class, race, ethnicity, nationality, and transnational movements.” Most students at Yale are there to study something useful (law, medicine, economics, etc.) and one supposes that few of them pay any attention to queer feminist literary criticism, yet the resources of Yale are so vast (the university’s endowment is valued at nearly $24 billion) that they can afford to employ Professor Homans to teach utter nonsense to whatever small number of Yale students might enroll in her courses. This is what “diversity” means in elite academia, where the faculty and administration exist in a surreal Through the Looking-Glass environment where the normal rigors of human existence never intrude.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Margaret Homans is the author of such lively books as Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson and Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing which you can purchase by clicking those Amazon links. Alternatively, you could purchase a samurai sword ($53.95) and the book Seppuku: A History of Samurai Suicide ($18.81), because disemboweling yourself in a harakiri ritual would probably be more enjoyable than reading feminist literary criticism by a Yale University professor. The choice is yours, really.

Comparing “diversity” to ritual seppuku might be an interesting thesis, considering how American society has spent decades disemboweling itself, so to speak, to comply with the fanatical devotion to Equality that is a quasi-religious faith among the liberal elite in the same way bushido inspired the ancient samurai. No practical consideration can be permitted to interfere with the process of conforming society to fit the intellectual abstractions — Equality! Progress! Science! — that are the idols worshipped in the Temple Cult of Social Justice.

“Diversity is our strength,” Bill Clinton said during one of those rare moments of his presidency when he was not too busy having sex with White House interns. It is an easy thing for politicians to invoke such slogans, just as it is easy for Yale University to provide full-time employment for a queer feminist literary critic, but the ordinary American’s experience of “diversity” is likely to be different than the experience of the political and intellectual elite who promote these ideas.

When ordinary Americans see Yale student Jerelyn Luther screaming obscenities at a faculty member, we don’t necessarily sympathize with the target of her tantrum. Certainly, there is no one on the Yale faculty whom I think worthy of respect, for I consider Yale University to be a corrupt enterprise with which no honest person would associate himself. America’s cultural elite is decadent and depraved, and everyone employed by Yale University — and Harvard University, and Columbia University, and Brown University, etc. — is part of the problem. Ivy League universities are evil places where wicked people are paid to poison the minds and destroy the souls of young people. That parents would pay $47,600 a year to send their children to Yale is astonishing. As I said of the Yale-educated feminist Alana Massey:

No Christian would dare go near such an ivy-covered Temple of Satanic Wickedness, except perhaps to deliver a prophecy of its imminent doom, then fleeing in haste before Jehovah sends fire and brimstone showering down to incinerate the foul stench of that latter-day Gomorrah.

The truth about “diversity” and other such slogans is that they substitute not only for facts and logic, but also for morality. If the standard by which people are judged is how their identity contributes to “diversity,” then no white male heterosexual Christian can have any value at all. Yale will pay $198,365 a year to employ a queer feminist professor like Margaret Homans, but under no circumstance would Yale University hire a white male heterosexual Christian, much less promote him to the chairmanship of a department. If there is even one Christian on the Yale campus, this represents a failure of Yale’s policy, as the university is nowadays dedicated to the abolition of Christianity. Of course, the admissions office and the faculty hiring committees have not yet perfected the application-screening process by which Yale detects and excludes Christians from campus. Not every student who graduates from Yale is a homosexual atheist — but they’re working on it.

This brings us back to Sam’s Club CEO Rosalind Brewer, who complained that she “met with a supplier and the entire other side of the table was all Caucasian males.” Why do you think this was? My theory is that the elite universities are so eager to recruit every smart and ambitious woman or member of a non-white minority group in America, that they have produced a shortage of female and minority talent in the private sector. If Yale University will pay a woman $198,365 a year to teach queer feminist literary criticism, after all, why should she even bother looking for a job in the private sector? University administrators promote “diversity” by doing everything possible to discourage men from attending — why do you think females are now 57% of college students nationwide? — and white guys are seeking opportunity outside academia. Ask yourself, would Yale ever hire a white male professor if there was a qualified female or minority applicant for the job? Of course not.

“To hell with Yale,” say the white guys, “let’s start a business.”

Everyone at Yale University shares Rosalind Brewer’s contempt for white men, who lack the one quality — “diversity” — that our decadent elite consider more important than anything else. Neither the CEO of Sam’s Club not anyone at Yale gives a damn how smart you are or how hard you work. If you are a white man, they consider you utterly without value. And if you are not only white and male but also heterosexual, every university is teaching their students to fear you as a rapist.

“Diversity,” on closer examination, is a slogan that is part of a propaganda of hatred, intended to benefit the Democrat Party. It’s like Progress, a slogan liberals use to imply that opponents of liberalism are old-fashioned. It’s like Science, a slogan liberals use to imply that opponents of liberalism are ignorant, superstitious bigots. And, of course, “diversity” is the handmaiden of Equality, the summum bonum of liberal belief, the raison d’être of the Democrat Party. Strange to say, electing more Democrats and enacting more liberal policies have failed to bring about the Utopia of Equality the Democrat Party has been promising voters for decades, any more than did Neville Chamberlain deliver on his promise of “peace for our time.”

Well, you can shop Amazon and buy a 1/32 scale model kit for a Stuka bomber or maybe a Panzer IV tank. Don’t forget to order paints — one set in military colors and another set for regular colors — some model glue, some brushes and other tools. These are some fine holiday gift suggestions for a young boy and maybe Dad, too. You can have fun together, and maybe explain to your son how it was back in the old days, when the leaders of America believed in waging war against our nation’s enemies, before we started electing our nation’s enemies as leaders, so that they can destroy America in the name of “diversity.”

The problem with liberals is that it is impossible to hate them as much as they hate America. Hitler never hated America as much as Barack Obama hates America, and as for Hillary . . .

Well, what difference at this point does it make?

I used to think Democrats were merely ignorant and incompetent, but if they were destroying America through bumbling stupidity, they might occasionally do something right by accident. Instead, we see that everything they do is bad for the country, and this record of 100% wrongness — their consistent pursuit of policies that hurt our nation — cannot be explained except by concluding that Democrats are evil and they are wrecking America on purpose.

Category: Culture, Education, Intellectuals, Racism

Comments

35 Responses to “Further Thoughts on ‘Diversity’ and the Ritual Suicide of American Culture”

Art Deco
December 15th, 2015 @ 6:18 pm

why do you think females are now 57% of college students nationwide? —

If I’m reading the statistics correctly, the propensity of the men of a given cohort to attend a baccalaureate-granting institution is about the same as it was in 1978, when our host was around the age to matriculate. What’s changed is that the increase in the propensity to attend has since 1978 been entirely concentrated on the distaff side, so you have to ask what’s up with that sector of the labor market for which (1) preparation would not have benefitted from college-level study in 1978 but (2) be does now benefit. You’d be looking at the sort of work which, in total income (including satisfaction, security, and prestige) puts it at around the 65th percentile of the jobs in the economy. Here’s a suggestion:

1. The labor market remains segmented (due to wildly different preference distributions) into a woman’s market, a man’s market, and a mixed market.

2. Trade jobs are a male preserve. I worked for a decade and a half for an employer that never had one man working in the personnel office. There were some lady IT techs, a horticulturalist, and a couple of machine operators in a warehouse. Out of a three-digit population of employees in trade jobs, 7 were female. The share of security guards who were female was higher. Women. Simply. Will. Not. Do. These. Jobs. (See Camille Paglia’s writings on this subject).

3. Clerical jobs outside of retail trade remain a feminine preserve. At that same workplace, the men working on the clerical staff consisted of a bookkeeper, a stock clerk, and a trio of data control clerks (out of a three digit population of clerks).

Here’s a suggestion: at the 65th percentile, job market signaling or vocational training requires a trip through higher education in the women’s market. In the men’s market, it doesn’t, with apprenticeships or training in technical and community college’s sufficing. Another suggestion: the propensity of higher education to capture vocational training (e.g. hospital diploma programs giving way to nursing schools at colleges and universities) has been stronger in the woman’s market that the men’s market.

One should note that in baccalaureate and graduate programs in subjects with the most robust operational measures of competence (engineering, business &c) men retain a large demographic advantage (just not an advantage as large as they had in 1970). Similarly, in the labor market, professional employments with robust operational measures remain masculine preserves and about 2/3 of those in management are men.

Kay S. Hymowitz offered a nonsense caricature of contemporary social relations because all she did was talk to girls in her social circle and read laddie magazines. In the real America, men remain a majority of employed persons. The number of employed men exceeds the sum of employed women and pre-school children. Men are a majority of those currently employed in every age group bar those under 20, wherein girls have a slim advantage.
The idea that women are excelling educationally and vocationally while men are overtaken by anomie and playing video games in their pyjamas is tommyrot. The men aren’t going to college because they do not need college for the kind of work they’re seeking to do.
Fail Burton
December 15th, 2015 @ 6:58 pm

Diversity is for thee and not me when it comes to these unhinged morons who describe themselves as “feminists.”

You’ll never hear them whine about the NBA, romance fiction, Taiwnese or Egyptian TV, boxing, rap music or anything else their con game memory-holes. They’re all for showing diversity in medieval Europe but not the invasion by Muslims part.

There are no literary awards exclusively for straights, whites or males. I can name two dozen which are for blacks, women or gays-only. In other words the people accused of marginalizing and exclusion are the only ones to have come-one-come-all awards. The others are segregated based on the shill called “diversity” because if straight white men dominate any hobby it’s on purpose. Anyone else and it’s random.

Diversity is for thee and not me.
NeoWayland
December 15th, 2015 @ 6:59 pm

Mr. McCain,

This is another spot where you and I disagree.

It’s not so much what is said and done. Who cares about the color of the skin? Who cares what your faith is? Celebrate your beliefs and cherish your faith. All I ask is the same.

Just don’t demand that my beliefs and actions are bound by yours. Live and let live.

What you believe isn’t important to me. Your freedom to choose what to believe, that is vital. That is what I will defend.

And that is what the RadFems and the rest of the Worst Progressives want to deny. That’s where you and I agree.

Who cares about the Victimhood Group of the Week? But show me someone who’s hurt and maybe we can do something about that.

It’s not the choices, it’s that people aren’t held responsible for their choices.

Don’t fight against choice. Just insist people accept responsibility.
Kirby McCain
December 15th, 2015 @ 8:33 pm

When I saw the trailer for the new Star Wars flick I thought, this is a remake. I think the original starred Spencer Tracy, Kat Hepburn and Sidney Poitier.
robertstacymccain
December 16th, 2015 @ 12:20 am

There’s also this: What does a 19-year-old guy want? Girls. What does he need to get girls? An apartment, a car and money. He can go to college and be broke, or he can go to work and have money in his pocket. The future consideration — the possibility of higher long-term earnings if he has a college degree — is just that, a future possibility. Unless he has some particular career field in mind, however, the value of this investment in a degree is a big question mark. Whereas if he can get a decent wage-earner’s job, he can move out, get an apartment, get a nice car and score.
Jason Lee
December 16th, 2015 @ 5:45 am

“My theory is that the elite universities are so eager to recruit every smart and ambitious woman or member of a non-white minority group in America, that they have produced a shortage of female and minority talent in the private sector.”

Yep. Plus there might be a dearth of talent outside of the white male cohort:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3611273/White-male-and-proud-of-it.html
M. Thompson
December 16th, 2015 @ 7:27 am

My observation going through the Late Department Store Owner Business School at Husky Hockey State U was that it was roughly evenly proportioned between men and women, especially in Accounting. Information Systems (B-School applied CSci) and Finance were more men, and Advertising and HR were more women.

However, this is anecdotal, not hard.
Quartermaster
December 16th, 2015 @ 8:48 am

No one is trying to make you choose something against you will. Not even God does that.
DeadMessenger
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:25 am

Indeed, and given what I pay my electrician, my plumber, and the guy who’s redoing my shower, I’d have to believe that men are far better off in trade jobs, because they start earning money on Day 1, and the amount only goes up from there.

Plus, if a guy becomes a master tradesman, he can run his own business, which sounds tons better to me than potentially working for some loser.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:25 am

I think that people do better when they accept responsiblity for their own actions and words.

I think that letting folks work it out for themselves works better than telling them what to do

I think that life and culture is something that you should experience and not read about.
DeadMessenger
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:33 am

Yeah, but the problem is, NW, is that we don’t live in a world that does that. It used to be more that way, even in my lifetime, but now those days are gone, and they’re not coming back during this period in history.

Some Unpleasant Things are going to happen in the fairly near future – perhaps you can even see them coming – and then we’ll return to those times.
DeadMessenger
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:40 am

Aren’t there more interracial marriages and relationships now than during any other time in Western history (or perhaps any history)? And yet, the kiss-ups at the Ad Council thought to make this little statement? What a bunch of progressive losers.

And I notice that there’s no white male skeleton (we might presume). I guess if they’d shown a white man holding hands with a black woman, there would have been an outcry.

Kirby, you should make your own ad showing Mario holding hands with Luigi, and one-up the Ad Council, lol.
CrustyB
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:41 am

That image of the White House smeared in the fecal smelling colors of the Homosexual Hijacking of Marriage movement. It’s the most disturbing image of America I’ve seen since I saw a painting when I was a kid of the White House in flames during the War of 1812. Even more disturbing than seeing the WTC in flames, which is an event from which America recovered. We may not recover from this.
DeadMessenger
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:45 am

But…but…but Muslim achievement!
CrustyB
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:53 am

Women don’t know what women want.
Men don’t know what women want.
Men know what men want.
Women know what men want.
Men want women.
-Jerry Seinfeld
Quartermaster
December 16th, 2015 @ 11:08 am

Christianity is all about accepting responsibility for your actions.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 11:47 am

Not all Christians do that.

Plenty of people who aren’t Christians do do that. It’s not exclusive to Christianity.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 11:54 am

Those days are gone only because we give people excuses. If we stopped enabling victimhood, we could dig ourselves out.

I don’t care what the Progressives do or say, I just want everyone to stop shielding them from the consequences. I know it’s not what they want, but it’s the only alternative to waiting for the disaster to happen so we can say “told you so.”
Quartermaster
December 16th, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

Those “Christians” that don’t have failed as Christians.
Prime Director
December 16th, 2015 @ 2:28 pm

1UP the ad council? Ppppbtt… what a waste
DeadMessenger
December 16th, 2015 @ 3:15 pm

I wholeheartedly agree that there needs to be consequences. That applies to everybody.

What I’m saying is that the “we” who might stop enabling victimhood are in the vast minority these days. Everyone else is either part of the problem or asleep at the wheel (the majority it seems), and have no interest in the truth claims of the “we”.

I just don’t see the population waking up until it’s too late to do anything. I see a population enslaved by a global dictator who comes into power by promising utopia, only to find out that he has no utopia and never will.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 3:55 pm

See, it’s not a question of Christian orthodoxy.

It’s about accepting responsibility for their choices.

If you really think it’s about deciding who is and is not a “failed” Christian, you’re missing the big picture. If you think this “battle” is about the threat to Christianity, you’re not even in the right country.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 4:02 pm

I’m not quite ready to sound the cloister bell just yet. I don’t think we should just sit down and await the inevitable doom. Mainly because I still think doom is evitable.

Every idea has to start somewhere. The worthy choices are never the easy ones.

Step one is to give a better show than the progressives. Whatcha got that’s better than “saving the world for it’s own good?”
Quartermaster
December 16th, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

You’re chasing squirrels again.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 4:34 pm

No, just pointing out the obvious.
Adobe_Walls
December 16th, 2015 @ 7:04 pm

I thought Diversity was one of the four Horsemen.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 7:15 pm

Diversity could never be a Horseman!

Exploiting a poor animal like that…
DeadMessenger
December 16th, 2015 @ 7:27 pm

That’s because you’re too young yet to have had the life force sucked out of your body by the Stupid Collective. : ) But I would encourage any potential Paul Revere’s to try.
NeoWayland
December 16th, 2015 @ 9:09 pm

That’s the second time you’ve said something about my youth. I think I’m a bit older than you believe I am. My hair is tinged with grey, and most of my beard is white if I don’t dye it regularly.
mole
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:11 pm

So who else here is old enough to remember when most of the libtard agenda was seen as morally deviant and not to be encouraged or “celebrated”?
Whats changed is being a victim is now a passport to entitlement, worse, victimhood you have never experienced yourself but your self identified group suffered in the past makes you morally untouchable.
The USSR had the plan to corrupt the “wests” traditions of self reliance and excellence, it has been a brilliant plan, self funded by leftist universities who always feel cheated that their vote is only worth as much as the proles in flyover country they hate.
The only weak link was their own political system was so crap they cratered first.
Can you imagine how the globe would look if the USSR at the height of its powers was confronted by the “west” now?
Daniel Freeman
December 16th, 2015 @ 10:21 pm

Well, but Diversity could be a centaur. Close enough to a horseman…
DeadMessenger
December 16th, 2015 @ 11:39 pm

O_O
NeoWayland
December 17th, 2015 @ 9:52 am

Wow!

A mythical and endangered species!

That might just work at that!
NeoWayland
December 17th, 2015 @ 10:04 am

Well, let’s just say I’m in the same age range. I don’t like to give too many personal details on the ‘net.

I’m more vain about my beard than my hair. Random grey and white can look good in hair, but it just makes an originally dark beard look dirty.
Kirby McCain
December 18th, 2015 @ 6:20 pm

It seems to me that the civil rights movement was just a Trojan Horse used to bring back Reconstruction. While the people associated with such things occassionally give lip service to minorities their charade is readily apparent in the Travon Martin case, for example, when a Latino man was given the ‘white man’ treatment. With that and many other recent events non-african minorities need wake up and realize only ‘Black Lives Matter.’