A welcoming and inclusive society is a community where its citizens and members feel safe, respected, comfortable in being themselves and in their ability to express all aspects of their identities. It is a place where every person shares a sense of belonging with others, where whatever benefits afforded to one must be afforded to everyone.
Obviously, it is a society that would never tolerate disadvantages associated with race, sex, religion or cultural background so all identity groups must be equally represented and valued. No one could assume anything about someone’s likely actions, abilities or personal qualities based on their identity as male, female, or somewhere in between, or black, white, Asian, young, old, Jewish, Mormon, gay, straight, genderqueers or whatever.
This is the utopian society that so-called respectable political, social, moral and religious leaders are pushing, supporting or caving to. To reject such a society would be to support prejudice and discrimination which is to say nothing short of social suicide.
It will be a society with mass unionization of its workforce, legal protections against arbitrary termination, a society where workers have more power than the owners of the companies they work for. It will be a society with government provided healthcare similar to Biden’s Medicare for All, free childcare, a family allowance, housing stipends based on income, government owned utilities, transportation, education, banking and housing. A society where there are no borders because it would be wrong to discriminate against anyone based on an accident of birth. No borders and no sovereignty. In other words, it is the Great Reset where we will own nothing and be happy – or else!
But to accept such a society means that one must believe that men can give birth and suckle their babies, that diversity is always strength, that a biological sex can morph into another sex at will, that children are born without sexual identity, that men molesting young children are doing it in the name of love and that God doesn’t judge.
Similar issues come up in connection with open borders where populations flow freely from worse to better living conditions until those worst living conditions are largely equalized worldwide. It also means that whatever human factors, i.e., tribalism, ingrained combativeness, religious or political fanaticism, lack of economically useful attitudes and skills, that once contributed to problems in the regions of their birth might just contribute to the destruction of the countries in which they migrate.
But we mustn’t worry about any bad effect of immigration because to do so would make us xenophobic. We must toss aside reality and common sense while loudly proclaiming that conditions in a country have no connection to the habits and qualities of its people.
We must pretend that open borders create inclusiveness and does not destroy all cultural traditions even though getting rid of such traditions can create problems. Radical disruption of cultural traditions means that the culture of the people can no longer be a largely inherited system reflecting long community experience. Instead, it becomes a matter of propaganda, internet memes, political ideology, commercial pop culture, and therapeutic talking points. As such, it seems unlikely to offer most people a satisfying or even tolerable way of life.
A problem that may be even more basic is the conflict between equal treatment and equal results. Colorblindness and the other formulations on which antidiscrimination laws once rested have long been superseded by a more affirmative approach to inclusion, so much so that the colorblind ideal is now dismissed as racists.
Sensitivity means we are to treat a Muslim woman differently because she’s a woman, an Arab, and a Muslim, and the celebration of diversity and inclusivity means we must think she adds something for those reasons. We are to believe that it’s great to have this woman around but at the same time believe it would be less great to have her around if she were a native-born Southern Baptist of Scottish descent. Doesn’t that sound like prejudice and discrimination?
The diversity movement is not only deeply flawed; it is also far from a harmless ethos with no consequences for our culture, our values, or our institutions. It is time to acknowledge that diversity often results in the opposite of what it so loudly proclaims: a closed-off world that stifles debate, learning, and mutual respect. Jay Haug
Source: The Idea of an Inclusive Society, by James Kalb, first published at Crisis Magazine, can be read in full at this link.
