An editorial by Ross Douthat (Oregonian via New York Times Oct. 18th, 2011) comes much closer to the truth about “diversity” than we normally see in the MSM. Speaking of the fate of Christian communities in the Middle East, Douthat explains the latest hardships in the context of an ongoing ethnic alignment along national borders, which has been going on for a long time.
Peace comes at a terrible price for diverse groups
… This is a familiar story in the Middle East, where any sort of popular sovereignty has tended to unleash the furies and drive minorities into exile. From Lebanon to North Africa, the Arab world’s Christian enclaves have been shrinking steadily since decolonization…
More important, though, this is a familiar story for the modern world as a whole – a case of what National Review’s John Derbyshire calls “modernity versus diversity.” For all the bright talk about multicultural mosaics, the age of globalization has also been an age of unprecedented religious and racial sorting – sometimes by choice, more often at gunpoint. Indeed, the causes of democracy and international peace have often been intimately tied to ethnic cleansing: Both have gained ground not in spite of mass migrations and mass murders, but because of them.
This is a point worth keeping in mind when reading the Big Idea book of the moment, Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Pinker marshals an impressive amount of data to demonstrate that human civilization has become steadily less violent, that the years since 1945 have been particularly pacific, and that contemporary Europe has achieved an unprecedented level of tranquility.
What Pinker glosses over, though, is the price that’s been paid for these advances. With the partial exception of immigrant societies like the U.S., mass democracy seems to depend on ethno-religious solidarity in a way that older forms of government did not. The most successful modern nation-states have often gained stability at the expense of diversity, driving out or even murdering their minorities on the road to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.
Europe’s era of unexpected harmony, in particular, may have been made possible by the decades of expulsions and genocide that preceded it. As Jerry Z. Muller pointed out in a 2008 essay for Foreign Affairs, the horrors of the two world wars effectively rationalized the Continent’s borders, replacing the old multi-ethnic states, and eliminating – often all too literally – minority populations and polyglot regions. A decade of civil war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia completed the process…
Along the same lines, the developing world’s worst outbreaks of ethno-religious violence… are often associated with transitions from dictatorships or monarchies to some sort of popular rule. And from Kashmir to the West Bank, Kurdistan to Congo, the globe’s enduring trouble spots are usually places where ethno-religious communities and political borders can’t be made to line up.
Whether we root for this process to take its course depends on how we weigh the hope of a better future against the peoples who are likely to suffer, flee and disappear along the way. Europe’s long peace is an extraordinary achievement – but was it worth the wars and genocides and forced migrations that made it possible?
In short, Douthat interprets the existence of many ethnic groups within the same borders as “diversity”, which he sees as a good thing. He carefully avoids telling us why this “diversity” is a good thing – such that its loss should be called a “price”. As a matter of fact, he has noticed the same patterns that Jared Taylor notes in his recent book, “White Identity“. But, while Taylor reaches the logical conclusion – that ethnic diversity is the source of conflict – Douthat tries to cling to his worship of diversity while, at the same time, admitting that millions have suffered and died because of it.
I would love to ask Douthat what his opinion is regarding the borders of Africa, which were drawn by European colonial powers – reportedly in order to throw diverse tribes together within the same nations. According to Douthat, this would be a good thing – because it brought the Africans the blessing of “diversity”. Or was it a good thing for Europe but not for Africa?
His assertion that the U.S. is an (partial) exception to the rule is, at best, premature. Perhaps he is unaware of the countless Americans who have been murdered, robbed or raped as a consequence of diversity. If so, then his ignorance is by choice; the information is readily available on the internet. For those of us who do not choose ignorance, it is obvious that the U.S. is not an exception. Fluoridated water and Big Macs cannot change human nature, nor can Congress legislate it away. Americans will pay the bitter price of ethnic diversity just as have others.
I wonder if, decades from now, another columnist will ask if the Great Ethnic War of 2030, which killed millions and left Europe and America in ruins, was too great a price to pay for the relative tranquility that followed. In the meantime, the diversicrats are frantically busy importing multitudes of foreigners and mixing up the borders even more – in order to set the stage for just such a war. If Douthat is among them, then he weeps for the suffering that he, himself, encourages.
Ross Douthat appears to be a confused man – or perhaps he is trying to provide a hint, to his readers, that diversity is not all it’s cracked up to be.
The fact that diversity is even considered a strength in the first place, when all evidence suggests otherwise, is beyond my comprehension.
It’s the failure to acknowledge the flaws of diversity that makes it easy for leftists to chastise the U.S. for not being more like Sweden, Canada, or other Socialist/semi-socialist (and predominantly WHITE) countries.
The U.S. could never be like Sweden or Canada, simply because it does not have the demographics. And of course, as places like Sweden become more “diverse,” they’ll start experiencing many of the same problems the U.S. has.
But all in all, very good post, JAY.
Of course, it is worth mentioning that certain types of diversity are good.
By that, I mean ideological and talent-based diversity. You want people who are good at math and science, proficient in the political sciences, and athletically and musically inclined.
But how in the hell is racial diversity a strength? Is there any evidence that importing a bunch of uneducated and low-skilled Mestizos/Indians has made the United States a better country?
It’s crazy, really.
And of course, it’s no coincidence that the world’s most unequal and tense societies (the U.S., Brazil, Israel, Malaysia, etc) are also the most racially diverse, whereas more homogenous societies such as Japan, South Korea, Finland, and Iceland are more egalitarian and safe/secure.
I challenge anyone, and I mean ANYONE, to show me the merits of racial diversity! C’mon, I double dare you!
Ask 1,000 people who spout the “ODIOUS” (Our DIversity Is Our Strength) mantra to tell you why or how “our diversity is our strength,” and 999 times, they’ll merely wind up defining diversity.
@ Countenance
Either that, or they go into a rant about how diversity COULD be made to work, if it weren’t for evil systems of inequality, privilege, oppression, etc.
For example, throughout his debate with Jared Taylor, the philosopher king of the anti-racist left Tim Wise couldn’t name ONE benefit of racial diversity.
All he could do was blabber on about how systems of inequality are the real problem, and how these racial identities are just social constructs, etc.
Ditto for Taylor’s debates with other anti-racists.
Well then tell me why Argentina and Chile, majority white populated countries who are just as unequal and tense, so run down? Claiming diversity is the ONLY problem why said countries are torn down, and eliminating such diversity will solve all the problem is bunch of horseshit.
I didn’t see anybody here claim that diversity is the ONLY problem that such countries are unsuccessful. Bad government is very effective in creating a living hell where high-IQ people would otherwise have probably created a decent place to live. Take North Korea for example.
The ONLY argument that I have heard that actually attempts to explain how racial diversity is a strength basically goes as follows:
We live in an increasingly global world and global economy, and therefore, we need an increasingly diverse and multicultural (IOW, multiracial) workforce in order to compete globally.
I saw this argument articulated in Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.”
Of course, as Jared Taylor has pointed out, that is absolute nonsense, and would come as a surprise to the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, all of whom are doing very well in the global economy and all of whom aren’t exactly crazy about racial “diversity.”
Think about it. Hispanics and blacks comprise most of this country’s “diversity.”
Now really, how in the hell are NAM’s going to help this country compete in a global economy that is increasingly becoming dominated by East Asia?
Besides, even if Africa were to rise (not likely anytime soon), it’s not like having a bunch of ebonics speaking American blacks would really help.
And I hardly see how mestizo/Indian Hispanics are going to help, considering that:
a) Latin America isn’t about to become a global powerhouse anytime soon
b) Most of the economic elites in Latin American countries are white anyway.
Not to mention that, again, you don’t need a diverse workforce to do business with different races and nationalities. Various countries around the world demonstrate this, whether it’s the Chinese and other East Asians or Russians receiving oil contracts from Iraq (despite not having many Arab Muslims in their leadership).
Bay Area Guy:
We live in an increasingly global world and global economy, and therefore, we need an increasingly diverse and multicultural (IOW, multiracial) workforce in order to compete globally.
But that really doesn’t even define diversity, much less state why it’s a strength. It just states a “fact” (or a bon mot taken as fact), then states that we have to do the same. The rest of the world is “diverse,” so we have to be “diverse” to understand the rest of the world.
Okay, but how is that “diversity” a strength either for the fiction known as the “global economy” or the United States?
Then, of course, there’s also the lame argument that racial diversity is good because “it allows us to listen to new perspectives.”
How exactly those “new perspectives” are beneficial is never explained.
It’s also true that one can listen to new perspectives and experience the richness and vibrancy of other cultures by reading books, the internet, TV, and travel. We don’t have to bring Africa or Latin America here to derive the benefits, if any, of their difference.
I think there is some allowable diversity (educated East Asians, for example) and that some is better than others (Mestizos are better than Africans) but given the lack of realism in most Americans I’d prefer to just lock down the borders and kick all illegals out of the USA.
I would disagree with East Asians, they are the most self-centered, xenophobic, uncreative, short-term oriented people out there and are no better then any other group, educated or not. They have been here for a while and have failed to establish any sort of cultural base in mainstream American culture and failed to assimilate compared to other groups because they look different and unattractive. If your point is that its a detriment to bring in “diversity”, why the hell are you giving East Asians a free pass when they themselves are doing the exact same things as those other groups but by different methods. I mean, are you forgetting the Yakuza and Triads?
I feel as though this entire issue is just a carpet-rug and a scape goat for America’s problems, problems which are rooted since the creation of the country. The U.S has a “Brand of Capitalism” and “culture” that transcends color, class and race, Any second generation person of any ethnic group born in the U.S, provided they come into contact with a nearby person or a television set here, will become conditioned and socially engineered to act a specific way, belief certain things and disregard things from their home country. You underestimate the lure of American culture. Everyone wants to be accepted, there has been research suggesting that these second generation kids don’t see people of different colors as different races but rather as people of different color. It’s only a matter of time till these groups assimilate all brain washed. Mestizo’s won’t have a problem assimilating because some of them look european; also technically this land doesn’t belong to you, it belonged to the Native Americans who breeded with various settlers and the mestizo’s are a result of that. It makes no sense to take a moral stance claiming uneducated mestizo’s are coming to “our” lands, when they have been here since the beginning and said land is not even yours.
Look at that guy main guy from entourage, he is of European extraction and native American extraction but he is still seen as white and accepted. Technically this would make him a mestizo.
Dan,
First of all, while I have no desire to see white people replaced by East Asians through mass immigration, several of your criticisms of East Asians, as a racial group, are patently unfair.
First of all, “Xenophobia” is inborn in practically all people. This is because, historically, a certain amount of xenophobia has been good for evolutionary survival, both by increasing in-group cohesion and protecting against threats posed by outsiders. If by “xenophobia”, you’re referring the immigration policies of East Asian countries, I would counter that they are, for the most part, simply common sense policies that protect the ethnic integrity and societal cohesion of their countries. As for how they act as immigrants in white countries, they’re hadly bad at all compared to other races. Historically, E. Asians have worked the hardest to assimilate into white societies, and they are certainly more law-abiding than other races (including, on average, whites). Of course, such assimilation can’t be perfect, because they aren’t white, but the point is that they’ve typically been the least likely group to insist that the host culture adapt to better suit them, rather than the reverse. As for the Yakuza (I don’t know much about the triads), they are hardly the worst of organized crime groups, and they have relatively little power in Japan, compared to, for example, the drug cartels in Mexico. I’d probably be far safer in any given part of Japan, even areas with relatively high levels of Yakuza activity, than in most parts of Mexico, and certainly far safer than in most African countries. As for Asians being “unattractive” as a group, I don’t think that’s a fair characterization either. Asian men do not strike me as ugly or deformed, and Asian women are quite attractive, in the main. It is extremely unlikely that I would ever marry an Asian woman, since I want my children to be white, but I wouldn’t claim that they’re “unattractive” by any stretch of the imagination.
Your second paragraph is, frankly, nonsensical. Are “Americans” to be united by the great temple of Wal-Mart and the prophets and prophetesses of popular “culture”, that come and go like the wind? Our “culture” “transcends” race, color, and class because it’s so debased as to have no minimum standards of inclusion. The fact that the American “brand of capitalism” (which has basically become “borrow money and spend it on googaws”) is probably the main common denominator among the polyglot collection of peoples gathered here is why I typically don’t identify my primary identity as “American”.
Furthermore,
There seems to be a double standard when people complain about whites taking North America from the Amerind tribes, but pretty much ignore the fact that similar seizures of territory of territory have defined most other races in history, and the process involved goes back to before the dawn of modern man. Most of Africa was once populated by pygmy Africans and Khoisan people, two groups whose remnants (pygmies and Bushmen) have largely been pushed either into the deeper jungles, or into the deserts, respectively, by West African negroids. Does anyone tell the West-African descended people that they should give back (the majority of) their continent to its “rightful owners”? No, largely because the current arrangement has been the status quo long enough that no one questions it. Going back to pre-modern hominids, the Neanderthals and Denisovans lost their very existence as distinct groups to Cro-Magnon invaders. Nobody complains about this state of affairs, of course, because there are no distinct groups of survivors of the dispossessed groups. They were either killed or absorbed.into the replacement population. Indeed, the historical competition for resources and mates practically guarantees that any human alive today has ancestors who survived by defeating and killing their competition.
I don’t take a “moral” stance against whites being displaced in this country. I frankly acknowledge that we obtained this land by conquest. What I care about is that we get to keep the land our ancestors conquered, or at least some part of it, rather than handing it all over to anyone who decides to come here and breed a lot. While they were the enemies of the white man, I can at least respect Indians like Sitting Bull who fought for the continuation of their own people. A leader of his caliber would be worth a hundred of the “respectable, mainstream” white politicians and commentators who routinely betray their own people, and who in some cases glory in our expected future destruction.
In any case, the mestizos’ Amerindian ancestors, for the most part, left the areas that currently comprise the United States centuries before whites conquered it. The idea, then, that this gives them some special right to the land that whites (who built most of the things the mestizos are coming here to benefit from), simply because it’s on the same continent, or their distant cousins were here at the same time, is patently silly. And the Amerindian tribes that lived in the southwest certainly didn’t historically feel any sense of common identity with the mestizos, at least if we’re to take their behavior towards mestizos who tried to settle there as the main indicator of their attitudes. Indeed, the main reason why much of the southwest was settled, not by mestizo Mexicans but by white Americans, even when the areas were technically ruled by Mexico, was that mestizos were afraid of settling in areas where the Indians hadn’t been wiped out or effectively pacified.
“Look at that guy main guy from entourage, he is of European extraction and native American extraction but he is still seen as white and accepted. Technically this would make him a mestizo.”
And this proves what, exactly? There’s lots of white people who have some Amerindian ancestry, especially in the southeast. Most of them look white (and are assumed to be so) because the overwhelming majority of their ancestry is, in fact, white. It says nothing important, then, about the assimilation of half-white, half-Indian (possibly with some negroid admixture) Mexicans. Plus, Mexicans get affirmative action brownie points for self-identifying as Hispanic, so why should they (even the whiter-looking ones) ever assimilate?
Usually, “diversity” in this case means racial diversity.
But again, if “diversity” is a strength because you get to hear diverse perspectives, then you’ve done nothing but define diversity.
“Then, of course, there’s also the lame argument that racial diversity is good because ‘it allows us to listen to new perspectives.'”
Actually, I think it’s more easily possible to have an honest debate about pretty much any idea in a racially and ethnically homogenous society where the racial angle doesn’t make such issues more contentious. I think the heritability of intelligence, for example, and the possibilities of eugenics could be more easily and civilly discussed in this country if there weren’t numerous blacks in this country who would be disproportionately affected by a eugenic policy directed towards raising the average intelligence of the population.
Of course, eugenics would still be a contentious issue, even in a monoracial society, because people are justifiably hesitant to make judgments about who should and should not reproduce, but the racial angle often shuts down debate entirely, and prevents a scientifically legitimate and socially relevant perspective from being listened to.
Indeed, I think that people who want the US to be a “proposition nation”, without any common ancestry to unite its people, are actually pushing (perhaps unwittingly) for the most repressive sort of society imaginable. Nations defined by a common ancestry can tolerate dissenting ideologies, at least to some extent, because everyone can think of themselves as a sort of extended family. This fact doesn’t change, whether one is a communist, a social democrat, or a free-market libertarian. By contrast, if a nation is defined by an idea, such as “all men are created equal” (hey, that’s sexist, screams the angered feminist), then to maintain societal cohesion, it must enforce ideological conformity in all things, and any idea that challenges the National Proposition must be suppressed, regardless of its veracity. “Proposition nations”, then, have a bad way of turning into Revolutionary France, or the Soviet Union.
Also, if the left believes so strongly in the benefits of diversity, why are they apt to blame the problems of sub-Saharan African countries on the fact that their borders tend to reflect the borders of European colonies in Africa rather the tribal boundaries of the indigenous Africans? Presumably all that cultural diversity should have made Rwanda a paradise of multicultural understanding and Nigeria a vibrant economic powerhouse. Instead, strangely enough, we find that the recent histories of these and pretty much every other African country are defined by the conflicts that arise between competing tribal groups, which at best retards the cooperation necessary to maintain a modern infrastructure and economy (having a population with an average IQ of 70 probably doesn’t help), and at worst leads to the horror stories that seem to come out of some part of Africa every year or so.
Also, if the left believes so strongly in the benefits of diversity, why are they apt to blame the problems of sub-Saharan African countries on the fact that their borders tend to reflect the borders of European colonies in Africa rather the tribal boundaries of the indigenous Africans?
Thank you!
So if white people react negatively to racial diversity every now and then and would prefer not to have it, they’re told that it’s a wonderful benefit, one that should even be forced on them if necessary, and any hostile relations on their part is pure evil racism. And such diversity should be forced if necessary.
Yet whenever there’s some ethnic conflict in Africa, white Europeans are blamed for redrawing tribal/ethnic boundaries for colonial purposes. In other words, forcing groups who don’t like each other to live side by side.
Can the left not see this contradiction? I mean, is forcing racial diversity on people acceptable or not?
But of course, we all know that it’s only acceptable when forced on white people.
Sorry for the redundancy. I forgot that I already said “forced if necessary”
I have a feeling Mr Douhaut will have to do penance and travel to the MLK diversity re-education centre.
Well said, Georgia resident!