Diversity

Morals come and morals go. What is right today, may not be right tomorrow.

From the time of its founding until a few decades ago, the citizens of America were mostly Christians of some kind. The Jewish citizens read parts of the same Bible. Most of the rest at least pretended to be Christians. Some of the founding fathers were theists. All of them subscribed to some version of Natural Law, which posits that all human beings share some innate sense of right and wrong. For most Americans, the Ten Commandments represented good and the seven deadly sins represented evil. Very soon, Christians will be a minority. Our moral standards will have evolved.

Moral standards have been evolving throughout history. The pharaohs’ priests, Roman vestal virgins and medieval monks were espousing very different visions. Aztec priests placated the gods by sacrificing virgins. Today’s iconoclasts, who are pulling down statues and renaming buildings because those honored had moral standards they find abhorrent are deluded to believe that their own moral standards are definitive and eternal. One day, statues erected in their honor will be torn down.

One recent evolution of morality is truly startling. We invented a whole new virtue, almost overnight. That would be DIVERSITY. I can find no reverence to such a moral concept in any religion or in the writings of any of history’s moral philosophers.

My cynical view is that the virtue was invented by university administrators and their lawyers to justify the continuation of affirmative action in college admissions after the practice had been outlawed in some states and constricted by Supreme Court rulings. My cynical corollary is that affirmative action often means a collection of human beings of different skin tones and sexual proclivities thinking the same thoughts.

As with most things, the story is not monolithic. Diversity virtue signaling does advance the cause of inclusion. In the beginning, “all men are created equal” fully applied only to white males who owned property. We have gradually widened the scope to include former slaves, women, homosexuals, mentally or physically disabled individuals and those who wish to change their sexual identity. We are now on the verge of including immigrants who have not gone through the legal process, a dangerous extension of rights in my view.

I would propose that the goal of inclusion and the evolution of moral standards could be better served by better goals. Here are some suggestions.

1. COLOR BLIND. The color of a person’s skin should be immaterial in every way. The best solution is that we would all be “people of color”. I propose tan as the appropriate color.
2. MLK. Quoting Martin Luther King Jr. about judging people by the content of their character often brings out the “racist” label. I will risk that. That is THE appropriate standard of judgement.
3. TRUTH & TOLERANCE. There is no such thing as my truth based on my life experience. Same for you. Your experience may inform my search for truth, but there is objective truth, which we can approach by dialogue and experimentation. The search for truth should be constant and inclusive. Nobody has a monopoly on truth and we need to listen to each other respectfully in our search for the best approximation.
4. ASSIMILATION. America is not a nation built on blood and soil. It is a set of ideals laid out in the Constitution and the amendments thereto. No one should be granted citizenship in our nation who does not subscribe to those ideals, and who is not prepared to defend those ideals — with their lives if necessary.

We invented the virtue of diversity almost overnight. We should abandon it just as rapidly.