One Bible verse that came to mind after reading through this chapter was Phil 1:9. Christian love is not to be outside knowledge and discernment. Love that tolerates evil is not love. Love that needs the kind of instruction Phil 1:9 gives means love can be misused. Instead of accomplishing God's purposes it can undermine them. This chapter by Johnson helps us understand the various ways "diversity" is used in society today - some good, some not so good.
Philippians 1:9 And this I pray, that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment
These lessons are part of a wider study seeking to answer a timely but age old question:
Psalms 11:3 If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
God set boundaries to protect us from evil. Underneath each boundary lays a foundation. When evil men redefine biological sex (Gen 1:27), they strike at that foundation. When evil men redefine marriage (Gen 2:23-24), they strike at that foundation. When evil men redefine nation (Gen 10:5), they strike at that foundation. When the footing is shattered, people lose hope and become easy prey to evil forces.
When God freed the sons of Israel from Egypt (Ex 1:1) He continued His promise to make them into a nation (Gen 12:1-2). He taught them as they marched through the desert to the Promised Land. He gave them their first lessons on nationhood. He reminded them of their history and origin. In the first 11 chapters, and of first importance, were the definitions of nation, marriage, and biological sex. From chapter 12 on, to the end of the New Testament, God persistently impressed these definitions upon His chosen, but deviant, people. His definitions were not contrary to the nature of things. This was His plan and means of bringing the world a Savior and conquering evil. What would have happened had He not held to these definitions or worked against His own laws of nature?
I hope to bring light upon these questions and others like them in this series of studies called What is a Nation? To explore this broader topic I will review a number of books, the first of which is The White Nationalist Manifesto by Greg Johnson. I will add some comments and study questions to each post to turn them into short 10-20 minute lessons. To go to the beginning of this series click here.
10: What’s Wrong With Diversity?
There are contexts in which diversity is a good thing. For instance, diversity of goods in the marketplace, diversity of options in life, diversity of opinions in politics and academia, and a diversity of points of view on juries for awarding prizes or deciding court cases.
But in the context of contemporary politics, diversity means something very specific, namely integrating a variety of different races and ethnic groups into the same society or institution. Diversity also refers to integrating women and sexual minorities into institutions that traditionally excluded them, such as the military. Obviously, one can imagine a society without racial and ethnic diversity, but one cannot imagine a society without both men and women. One can, however, imagine a society in which men and women have fairly distinct social realms and roles.
Multiculturalism, multiracialism, feminism, and the LGBTQ agenda constitute the primary sense of diversity today. The people promoting it often have very little use for diversity of opinions and freedom of choice. This politically correct version of diversity is my focus here.
It is no exaggeration to say that praising diversity is the civil religion of our time. Whereas in the past, it was obligatory for everyone—especially the ambitious and powerful—to pay lip service to Christianity, today people compete to offer the most fulsome praise and heartfelt professions of faith to the God of diversity. Beginning with Bill Clinton, US Presidents—Republican and Democrat—have repeated the mantra that “diversity is America’s greatest strength.” Not just any strength, but our greatest strength.
Even as the military, police, and fire departments lower standards of physical strength to increase diversity, they proclaim that their true strength lies in diversity itself. Indeed, in 2007, General George Casey, then in command of all US troops in Iraq, proclaimed that “I firmly believe that the strength of our Army comes from our diversity.”[1] Not weapons, not technology, not training, not the muscles and character of men, not the unity of a common purpose. But diversity. Let us hope this theory is never tested in battle against a serious opponent.
Even as educational institutions lower admissions and graduation standards, gut curricula of demanding classes, create entire disciplines to give degrees and academic jobs to members of marginalized identity groups, and spend vast sums on minority recruitment and diversity propaganda, they claim that education is stronger than ever because of all the diversity, even though by all objective measures, society is spending more on education and people are learning less than ever before.
The same delusional thinking is rampant throughout every other sector of society: business, religion, charities, the arts, etc.
White Nationalists oppose diversity. We want racially and culturally homogeneous homelands for all white peoples. Because our views go against the whole cultural and political mainstream, White Nationalists need to have a good answer to the question, “What’s wrong with diversity?” Here are four reasons why diversity would be a bad thing, even if whites were not threatened with extinction.
1. Diversity Means White Dispossession
The first and foremost reason why diversity is bad is quite simple. Whenever we talk about increasing diversity in a community or a business or a church or a school, that is always a euphemism for having fewer white people.[2] Why in the world would white people think that’s desirable? There’s really no good answer to that.
So when someone says, “You’ve got a nice little town here—it’s affluent, it’s clean, it’s friendly—but it lacks a certain diversity,” the proper answer is: “So, you think there are too many white people here? What’s wrong with white people? Why don’t you like white people?”
Now some might respond that they don’t wish to decrease the number of white people. They just want to add some spice. But this reply assumes that there’s no such thing as scarcity, so that you can add new people to a community without increasing costs and decreasing benefits to the people who are already there. Yet it is legitimate to ask if increasing diversity will take away opportunities from whites while increasing traffic, crime, alienation, conflict, and other social burdens.
Beyond that, even if someone says he does not wish to decrease the absolute number of white people, he is still maintaining that there are too many white people as a percentage of the overall population. So demand to know why he wants the white population to be diluted.
If diversity just means white dispossession, then obviously it’s a bad thing for white people. Obviously white people were bound to start resenting it. Now we are starting to resist it. White Nationalism is simply the inevitable resistance to the anti-white ethnic cleansing that we call diversity.[3] Welcome to the resistance.
Of course increasing diversity is bad for the native peoples of any land, not just whites. When whites came to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, weren’t they just increasing the diversity of the place? My first ancestor to arrive in the Americans set foot in Jamestown in 1612. He was fleeing oppression and poverty. He was trying to build a better life for himself and his family. And he was bringing diversity to the New World. But whites never get any credit for that. It’s always described as colonialism and genocide when whites do it. Isn’t it just as bad when non-whites do it to us?
2. Diversity Weakens All Institutions
Diversity, we are told, will strengthen literally everything. Presumably this strength means that every institution touched by diversity will perform its function better. Neighborhoods will be better places to live. Governments will better promote justice and harmony. Schools will better educate and train students. Hospitals will better heal the sick. Armies and police will produce more security. Firemen and EMTs will save more lives. Churches will save more souls. Businesses will produce more profits. And so forth.
But this makes no sense. Every institution is defined by its goals. Thus to function well, every institution must find people who are good at promoting its goals. Teachers have to teach. Firemen have to fight fires. Soldiers have to fight enemies. Etc. The primary criterion for hiring and promoting people in any institution is ability to contribute to the institution’s purpose. No institution can be improved by introducing competing criteria of success, like diversity.
Therefore, as soon as diversity becomes the “greatest strength” of any institution, people will naturally lower its proper standards of success to promote diversity. For instance, soldiers and firemen must be physically strong to perform their functions. But when diversity becomes a value—especially the integration of women into professions requiring physical strength—standards are inevitably lowered, thus weakening the institution in the most important way: by making it less capable of performing its function. Thus diversity is not a strength. It is a weakness.
3. Diversity Is A Source Of Conflict
Diversity is a source of conflict within institutions and within societies as a whole. These conflicts impede them in performing their proper functions, even if one does not adopt the goal of artificially promoting diversity. A school divided by conflict cannot teach as well as a harmonious one. An army divided by conflict cannot fight as well as a unified one. A society riven by conflict is a less pleasant place to live than a peaceful one.
The idea that any society or institution is improved by diversity is an aberration of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. No serious political philosopher or statesman of the past would have entertained the idea for a moment.
The aim of politics is to create social order and harmony. Basically, it’s the problem of getting along with one another. Social life has to deliver net benefits to its participants, or people will go their separate ways, and society will collapse. But beyond that, since we’re not just selfish individualists, we need to cultivate social responsibility and investment, so that people work to better society and are actually willing to die to ensure that it is preserved and perpetuated. Those are the great problems of politics: creating social harmony and a deep sense of an identification with the body politic, responsibility to the body politic, willingness to lay down one’s life for the body politic.
Now, how does racial and ethnic diversity help with those goals? Imagine you’re living on a leafy, idyllic suburban street where lots of children play. As the population grows and traffic congestion gets worse, however, you notice that a lot of people are driving through your neighborhood rather fast. They’ve discovered that your street is a short-cut from one clogged artery to another, so they’re racing through your once peaceful neighborhood, endangering little kids.
You decide to do something about it. You want the city to install speed bumps. To do this, you must first go to your neighbors and get them on your side, so you can go as a bloc to petition the city for speed bumps. But to get your neighbors on board, you need to be able to communicate with them. Wouldn’t that be nice? But in America today, there are lots of neighborhoods where you cannot communicate with your neighbors anymore. They don’t speak the same language.
Beyond that, even if you speak the same language, you still need to have the same values. White nations are now being colonized by people who are not invested in them at all. They are here simply to take. They come from societies that are characterized by public squalor and private splendor. Inside the walls of their houses, everything is lovely, but out in the streets there are dead dogs and potholes, and that’s just fine with them. That’s their value system. Try motivating people with that value system to get involved with putting speed bumps on your street, even if they have little kids, even if it might protect them. It’s very difficult.
To pursue common aims, you need to already have things in common. You need a common language for communication. You need to know each other’s minds. But then when you know each other’s minds, you’ve got to have the same values, or you’re never going to be able to pursue the same goals.[4]
Diversity undermines all of these things. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to pursue or preserve the many social goods that were created when the United States or Sweden or any other European society was predominantly European, i.e., when people spoke the same language, had the same values, knew each other’s minds, and felt they could give to the community because it wasn’t going to be an act of unreciprocated self-sacrifice. Increased diversity causes decreased social trust, decreased social commitment, and the destruction of the public realm.[5] That’s not good for society.
Thus philosophers and statesmen through the ages have considered racial, ethnic, and religious homogeneity to be enormous blessings. For instance, American Founder John Jay—who had to think more deeply about the sources of political order than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama—noted with pleasure in Federalist Papers No. 2 that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs …” Jay did not even regard Negro slaves or American Indians to be part of the American people. The Founders believed that trying to integrate them into the new system on equal footing with whites would have made the new society weaker, not stronger.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore, had to create order in a multiracial society, which led him to embrace authoritarianism, not liberal democracy. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Yew stated, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and[6] social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” Thus democracy in a multiracial context was not consistent with political order, particularly a political order that could pursue a common good. Democracy cannot reliably arrive at a governing consensus unless the people who vote are already quite similar to one another. Without a relatively homogeneous population, order has to be imposed from the top down. Thus as diversity increases, democracy fails.
The ancient verity that diversity causes conflict is also supported by contemporary social science. For instance, Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam studied 41 communities in the United States, ranging from highly diverse to highly homogeneous. He found that social trust was strongly correlated with homogeneity and social distrust with diversity. He found that even people of the same race and ethnic group trust one another less when they live in diverse communities. After eliminating other possible causes for variations in social trust, Putnam concluded that “diversity per se has a major effect.”[7] Diversity leads to the breakdown of social trust, which leads to the general decay of social order. Thus, according to Putnam, in diverse communities people trust the government and media less, feel politically disempowered, participate less in politics and community projects, volunteer less, give less to charities, have fewer friends, spend more time watching TV, and feel less happy about their lives.
Political scientist Tatu Vanhanen arrived at similar conclusions from a comparative study of diversity and conflict in 148 countries.[8] Vanhanen found that social conflict is not strongly correlated with differences of wealth and poverty, or with differences between democratic and authoritarian governments. But it is strongly correlated with diversity. Whether they are rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian, diverse societies have more conflict than homogeneous societies, which are more harmonious, regardless of levels of wealth or democratization.
Promoting diversity is a bad way to run any society, even ones not threatened by demographic decline.
Click on the "The White Nationalist Manifesto" tag below to see all the posts in this series. To go to the start of this series click here.
Questions & Notes
https://www.army.mil/article/6405/gen_casey_announces_creation_of_diversity_task_force ↑
Whenever we talk about increasing diversity in a community or a business or a church or a school, that is always a euphemism for having _________ _________ _________. ↑
_________ _________is simply the inevitable resistance to the anti-white ethnic cleansing that we call diversity. ↑
To pursue common aims in society you need to have the same _________ for communication and the same _________ to pursue common goals. ↑
Increased _________ causes decreased social trust, decreased social commitment, and the destruction of the public realm. ↑
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2005/08/lee-kuan-yew-interview.html ↑
Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century,” Scandinavian Political Studies, 30 (2007), p. 153. ↑
Tatu Vanhanen, Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism (Stamford, Conn.: JAI Press, 1999). ↑