1. Home
  2.  » 
  3. Commentary
  4.  » An Impolitic Slumgullion

Fred Reed — The Unz Review Feb 15, 2018

diversity

Gazing out over the chaos of America today, the racial and ethnic antagonism, the hostility over sex and faith and politics–I have never seen anything like it. The country is imploding. The main culprit is diversity–in the broad sense, not just the juxtaposition of races, but the mixing of ideas and philosophies with no dominant culture to maintain order. Current policies promoting this mess are insane.
We hate each other.
Countries are happiest when they have one national culture, or at least one dominant culture to which all must perforce conform. We see this in countries like Japan and Korea, homogeneous societies which, because homogeneous, have no race riots or religious wars. It was largely true in, for example, Sweden and France until they began admitting immigrants from incompatible cultures. Today, most of the news from such countries deals with the consequences.
Diversity, never a good idea. is in fact the cause of most of the world’s conflicts: Shia and Sunni, Jew and Arab, Hutu and Tutsi, Tamil and Sinhalese, Hindu and Muslim and, in America, black, white, and brown. Diversity is the cause of the dissolution of American society.
Until roughly the Sixties, America was homogeneous enough, overwhelmingly white, European, Anglophone, and Christian. This provided sufficient commonalty that people all regarded themselves as Americans. At the same time, there were many geographically separated subcultures which had little in common and didn’t like each other, or wouldn’t have if they had come into contact. Massachusetts, Montana, Alabama, West Virginia, and New York were different civilizations.
It worked because the different sections had little contact with each other. Life was intensely local. Roads were poor, limiting commerce. There was of course no internet. Telephone calls were expensive and there was no direct long-distance dialing. The federal government lacked the capacity to dictate to local communities. Radio meant local AM stations. Businesses were mostly owned locally with few chains run from remote corporate offices.
People consequently lived among others like themselves, who had the same values and ideas about how things should be done. In Virginia high school boys drove to school with shotguns in deer season so as to get to the woods when classes ended. It would have been unthinkable in Boston. In the Bible Belt the Ten Commandments might be on the wall in the courthouse, which everyone thought natural. Tidewater Virginia believed in gentility while West Virginia liked a wild and rough freedom. These wee not compatible yet there was no friction because pretty much everyone in these regions believed what everybody else did.
Then everything changed. Diversity began, not at first of people so much as of ideas. Reasons were several. Communications improved. Interstates appeared. The federal government gained in power and reach. The Supreme Court began making sweeping decisions on manners, morals and faith–that is, on culture and values–which it had not done before. Now Washington–New York, really–could enforce these decisions.
The result was unwanted cultural diversity. The Court decided in decision after decision that increasingly explicit pornography enjoyed protection as free speech, imposing an alien ideology on small towns in Kansas. This culminated in internet porn accessible to children of ten, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Obscene music poured out of New York as local stations were bought by Manhattan, from which rap came–unfit, in most regions, for a toilet wall. Towns could not defend themselves because of the doctrine of free speech and the massively increased power of the northeast. Television became national with similar trampling of local values of faith, propriety, and race.
Particularly invasive was the newly invented doctrine of separation of church and state. For at least a hundred and fifty years no one, neither court nor individual, had noticed that the Constitution forbade manger scenes on the town square at Christmas, or the singing of carols on public streets, or mention of the Bible in schools. It was yet more compelled cultural diversity.
Then came the compulsory mixing of disparate populations that we usually think of today as diversity. First came the racial integration of blacks and whites, cultures with virtually nothing in common. It worked as well as was widely expected. The two differed sharply in manners, morals, attitudes to education, dress, and acquiescence to law. The result was the disaster we see daily in the news.
The Latinos came. While they resembled whites much more than did blacks, they were racially distinct and differed in culture. Hostility arose among native whites. who liked their culture as it was.
The obvious soon became evident to those not ideologically resistant to it: In matters cultural, you can’t have it both ways. When you mix in schools populations whose values are contradictory–say, those who believe in clean language and those three quarters of whose discourse consists of “motherfucker,” one side has to give. You cannot require half of the studentry to follow a dress code while allowing the other half to wear pants almost around their ankles. Those who did not eat pork or did eat dogs coexisted uneasily with those who had opposing dietary ideas. Those who mutilated their children’s reproductive organs in one manner (Christians and Jews) and those who did it in another (Muslims) came into conflict.
The less well diversity worked, the more furiously its advocates sought to impose it. Feminists arose, hostile to men and powerful enough to impose themselves on society. They pushed women into the infantry, where they did not fit and did not belong: more ill-advised diversity. Homosexuality went from being quietly tolerated to being taught to children in grade school. though their parents abominated it.
Those inhabiting the extreme reaches of political correctness imagine a world as they think it should be and then try to move into it, dragging everyone else along. I think of the Beatles insipidly crooning “All You Need is Love” in eternal adolescent sanctimony. They of course hated those who disagreed with them. Obama, who transparently liked neither whites or America, imported many hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were almost impossible to assimilate. It was, I suspect, revenge for 1619.
It did not, of course, work. And so the papers carry endless stories of Islamophobia, dislike of Jews, attacks on Christianity, of misandry, looting of malls, burning of cities, White Nationalism, Black Lives Matter, calls for The Wall, novel policies regarding bathrooms, anger over Spanish on federal forms, affirmative action, perennial academic gaps, the demands of the various sexual curiosities, the Knockout Game, special privilege for this and that group, and a seething anger and despair over a country that many remember but no longer exists.

Source