Some Thoughts on Diversity

An Effort to Redeem a Politically-Charged Word

Not too long ago, I invited on my podcast a member of The Satanic Temple. His name is Stephen Bradford Long, and I was introduced to him through another guest on the podcast, Brookings Institute Scholar Jonathan Rauch. As a Christian, I did not know what to expect. What turned out to be was one of my favorite podcast conversations. We bonded over our mutual love for Milton’s Paradise Lost, our misgivings of the current political culture, and our strained sympathies for Nietzsche. The podcast will be scheduled close to Christmas (don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me).

Stephen’s podcast, Sacred Tension, is one that I listen to religiously (the irony of that statement is not lost on me, either). I discovered in him someone fully committed to the principles of liberalism, namely free inquiry and religious tolerance. Genuine diversity, I believe, starts with these two tenets. I am filled with indescribable dismay when diversity has been co-opted into harmful elitist programs aimed to indoctrinate university-goers, while the reactionary Right dunks on the notion that diversity is good for America. To affirm it once more, diversity IS good for America, but only when it is well understood.

This essay will not feature me singing the virtues of diversity, but to present a way to understand the word in its true meaning. Up until now, “diversity” is understood in American politics to describe something like a Gap commercial: names and faces of people of different races, genders, and sexualities being featured as equal contributors in a company boardroom, academic seminar, government cabinet, etc. When President Joe Biden promised to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court (and, to give him credit, delivered on that promise), he was adhering to this version of diversity. Similarly, Special Counsel Archibald Cox’s testimony during the 1978 Supreme Court affirmative action case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke also adhered to this definition of diversity:

When the Committee on Admissions reviews the large middle group of applicants who are “admissible” and deemed capable of doing good work in their courses, the race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases. A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.

This view of diversity, I argue, is superficial at best, and harmful at worst. Superficial, because it discounts the diverse national, cultural, religious, political, and philosophical traditions with underlies all human beings. Harmful, because it presents a cheap caricature of pluralism that can be construed as a strawman by liberalism’s opponents. Tolerance, a virtue disdained by the Right and scorned by the Left, is crucial to fostering a pluralistic liberal republic. Without it, we are either left with a perpetual state of Balkanization, or the tyranny of a monoculture.

Tolerance, defined as “willingness to accept behavior and beliefs that are different from your own, although you might not agree with or approve of them”, applies to both religious and secular beliefs. In Western Europe, it was applied to put on hold the bloody wars waged between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In America, it is the governing ideal that allows for citizens of various beliefs to be fully recognized under the Constitution. Previously persecuted faith groups like the Quakers, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Amish have appealed to the Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom to appeal their respective cases. Similarly, in the political sphere, the First Amendment of the same Constitution represents the remarkable breadth of which political speech can be protected.

A consequence of this broad application of tolerance is that the views and opinions aired by the extreme fringes of our politics are entitled to the same protection as the ones accepted by the mainstream. If that is not the case, then the police would have come knocking on Alex Jones’s door by now. This aspect of tolerance is the least popular among those who wish to live in a free society, both of the Left and Right. The woke Left, employing a mutated form of political correctness, militate against all ideas outside of their narrow orthodoxies, creating a climate of anxious self-censorship. In response, the populist Right wields the hammer of anti-woke against any concerns regarding the protection of racial and sexual minorities. I am currently writing this essay in Hungary, where a Right-wing populist government promotes intolerance of progressive social justice ideology. In contrast, Canada, where I spent my four years as an undergraduate, sees many of its most respectable institutions being steamrolled by the same progressive orthodoxy. Both regimes maintain their legitimacy by fostering animosity towards an unseen enemy, namely those who embodies the views they find odious. While both wishes to have their views heard in the public square, neither is willing to give the opposition the same benefit.

Intolerance of this kind works against genuine diversity, which is individual-based rather than group-based. The prominence of black intellectuals like Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes shows that black Americans do not think alike, and should not be easily categorized as an interest group. This promotion of “groupthink” is prevalent amongst the progressive Left, while on the national conservative Right, all groups and individuals are subsumed under a “nation” or a “people”. For genuine diversity to flourish, another virtue must be emphasized: rational free inquiry. Of course, the promulgation of free inquiry requires free individuals, and will always pose a challenge to the status quo, whether left or right.

Restlessness is the intellectual’s curse - no serious thinker finds satisfaction in what things are. The status quo, thus, invites either reform or revolution. The suppression of ideas almost always invite revolt, while the promotion of free inquiry often results in moderation and reform. As said by John Stuart Mill, there is truth to be found in false ideas, and those who believe themselves to have true positions risk falling victim to personal hubris. Diversity, I believe, requires a level of nuance within moral and intellectual judgment, as well as a constant dosage of humility.