Diversity

[fpb]

Plato knew what he was talking about when he said that people love what they do not have. To be precise, however, one ought to say that people make an idol of what they lack. The excessive worship of a quality in the abstract is often accompanied by the gaping and damaging absence of that quality in daily life. For instance, Mussolini's political system and claims (once, of course, he had abandoned his pacifist and socialist beliefs) hinged on an exaggerated, overheated, roaring assertion of the ultimate value of Willpower - Will as the first and final quality, Will as the heart of politics and life. And so one is not surprised to find that in real life Mussolini was catastrophically overwhelmed, to the point of enslavement, by the stronger willpower of Adolf Hitler. It was because he had no strong and living willpower - such as that which Francisco Franco, from a much weaker position, exercised to keep himself out of a disastrous alliance - that he made so much of Willpower in the abstract. Likewise, we are not surprised to find that the author of the super-rationalist fantasy of Sherlock Holmes was, in his own life, a devoted believer to the most depressingly irrational and ridiculous mystical fads, falling even for two ten-year-old girls' obviously fake pictures of fairies. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't have a lick of sense, but had enough sense of what reason meant to create, from his own internal lack, an immortal fantasy of the omnipotence of reason. In reality, hardly any investigation is solved, or indeed can be solved, by Holmes' methods; but that is not important.

Why am I saying this? Because of a fresh and rather disgusting experience. Somewhere in LJ-space there is a densely populated thread of people who have all felt the need to repeat, with very narrow stylistic variations and no variation of content at all, the same proposition; to assert to each other the very same views; to repeat to each other what each has just said to the other, and then pat each other on the back for their brilliant and principled, individual resistance against the forces of oppression.

What was their common theme?

Diversity.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Don't say that too loud - they mobbed me for a racist for less than that. But you are perfectly right and I've seen this kind of crap in action. One American idiot commented on a thread by a French friend of mine that she would never want to move to Europe because she had inquired how many blacks there were in Europe and there weren't enough for her - not diverse enough. That a continent featuring every variety of Christianity plus a few other religions, fifty to a hundred separate languages and even more literary traditions, three thousand years of written history, and more than thirty sovereign states, might have something that might be called diversity, did not enter her empty head. THERE HAD TO BE BLACKS!! (There are, in fact, but not enough for her.)

[capnflynn.livejournal.com]

And yet suggesting that maybe black people, like any other people, should be valued for themselves and not because they fill some kind of magical ideal diversity quota--well, that idea is racist.

All Are Welcome in My Tent - even annoying haters.

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

I'm self identifying as a non-player of the diversity games. Mutt Judo. Remember the Great Wisdom of a Fish Called Wanda:
"Don't call me an idiot! Idiots don't read philosophy."
"Sure they do, Otto. They just don't understand it."