Pseudo-diversity

Everyone is yelling these days for more awareness of diversity yet at the same time complaining that we, as a culture, are much too divided. Division is indeed a dangerous place to be, but I am observing an odd paradoxical sort of division that people keep pushing out there. As an example, I recently saw a meme extolling the health virtues of a “no fat” diet, relegating meat, eggs, oils and fats to the trash bin of ill health anti-nutrition. Immediately responding to the meme were the many sides of nutritional “truth,” none of them in agreement. Some comments included, “I wish people accepted the truth about nutrition” and “there is so much misinformation out there regarding the food we eat, it needs to stop” and “there is only one truth and one set of facts about what is good and what is bad for you to eat.”

Really?

I come from an age where many ideas were allowed to co-exist in the world. Sure, there were the “most popular” ideas, or the ideas that “science approves” of, or the Pope approves of, or the Democrats, or the Republicans. Sure, there were ideas that were embraced by the majority of people, and ideas that were rejected by the majority and pushed by various minorities. But all in all people accepted the fact that there were always going to be differing ideas, and as pesky as they might be, they were here to stay.

Maybe I am being naïve here. Maybe there always has been an insistence by the majority to stamp out the minority and claim the prize of being right (because it was always just assumed that the “right” were also the “majority”). Certainly racism falls in this category. In the United States, since the beginnings of slavery, black Africans were considered a lessor race (as well as the aboriginal people the majority white Europeans found here when they barged in and took over). When the first efforts to control, or eventually eradicate, these minorities failed (well, eradication was quite successful in some instances), there came along a great noble effort to welcome them into the fold and to have them join the rest of us as one big family. Right. That didn’t seem to work out well either. Now it seems the whole experiment has gone haywire and no one knows up from down.

I’ll drop racism for a moment because that is far too complex an issue and return to nutritional diversity, or more accurately and succinct, objective diversity. That phrase is an oxymoron to begin with. Objectivism by its nature is diverse, at least the way we approach the world as it materially manifests before us. Diversity is actually a description of our objective world. Nothing out there is the same as anything else, and even if we wish to subjugate any and every thing into nice neat categories so we can keep up with them, we run into trouble.

It seems I am stumbling with the term “diversity.” Isn’t that what all the fuss is about these days? Everyone seems to want to be identified and seen as unique, but at the same time they wish to have no uniqueness at all. The culture seems to be wanting to cancel out any thought, thing, idea, concept, skill, culture, biology, gender/sex, that claims uniqueness, a strength or weakness, a difference good or bad, but at the same time wants a unique title for all this as well as a recognized exclusivity. Inclusivity and exclusivity: there seems to be no tolerance for sameness, but also no tolerance for difference. Now THAT’S the formula for a mess.

There is a dangerous sort of polarization here. In an effort to acknowledge the sameness of everything we are actually categorizing anything that claims to be different as the enemy—which means everything is the enemy that’s contrary to an individual’s own position or group. Talk about the snake eating its tail.

Our culture is beginning to believe there is only one central idea about everything, and anyone professing any loyalty or alliance with something contrary to this chosen “one thing” is: evil, stupid, a moron, a science denier, racist, trans phobic, homo phobic, bigot, ignorant…need I list more?

What I am saying here may seem contrary to the intention behind all of this—I don’t doubt it is. The intention seems to be, at least started out to be, tolerance to diversity—a respect for different ideas, different cultures, different world-views. Instead, however, we are achieving the opposite. Rigidity is setting in, intolerance is setting in, and a worldview that has no consideration for new ideas, or different viewpoints of the many issues and challenges our society faces.

Take the nutrition example given above. Why is it that people cannot accept that there are many highly educated doctors, scientists, and nutritional experts who have just as many different ideas about what is good for us and what is bad for us to eat? They have their reasons for believing what they believe, and even though we might have reason too to vehemently disagree with them, why not go our way and the other viewpoints go their way? People clearly have this false notion that science is settled on this matter. It isn’t. Nor is science settled on much of anything. This is a simple example, but this rigid and militant style of handling controversies applies to many other situations.

I am not saying we should not stand up to bigotry and injustice, that is not the point at all, but we should also not insist that we decide, as a certain group, what is best for everyone else. We must learn to accept diversity, be tolerant of minority world-views, and not make it our mission to have everyone in the world think in a particular, and rigid, way.

This is a phenomenon that is clearly present in our current environment, not only seen in the challenges of the “Woke/Cancel” culture but in the challenges of the Covid assault on humanity. As has been presented numerous times throughout the alternative literature, there is a clear and wholesale dismissal of any conversation coming from a non-mainstream source. Views, both political and scientific, from the “other side” are categorically rejected. This is not a casual rejection, but a vicious one filled with degradation, hatefulness, prejudice and vindictiveness.

No one is saying that everyone must agree on one central idea, but all people should not only be willing, but insisting, that all views be present and debated. And that the presenters not be vilified and disgraced through ad hominem slander. Tolerance is the operative word here. As I have pointed out, this rigid way of dealing with our own diversity as unique races, cultures, even as scientists and researchers, is going to be our downfall as human beings. Rigidity and intolerance has never fared well. As in nature, an unbending tree will eventually snap. If we don’t change our path we won’t need to listen for it too carefully, the snap we will hear as our global society cracks will be quite loud, and quite devastating.