It’s one of the great ironies of our time that the word “diversity” is repeated everywhere, while the opposite, a stultifying homogeneity, is the reality that’s enforced “on the ground.”
Our educational institutions offer the classic example.
Is there any self-respecting college or university that doesn’t tout its commitment to “diversity” these days?
You can’t peruse a college’s promotional literature, let alone set foot on its campus, without being inundated by assurances that diversity is its most cherished value, the cynosure to which every other pursuit is subordinated.
But when you look at what they actually teach and preach, it turns out that rigid conformity is the order of the day.
We used to titter that there were people whose title was some variation on “dean of diversity.”
“You’re kidding, right?” was the response.
No one is laughing now.
On an increasingly wide range of subjects, only one opinion is granted the patent of diversity. Those deans are there not to invigilate academic excellence but to enforce social and moral conformity.
From an epistemic linguistic perspective, what we’re seeing is the triumph of deflationary or ironizing quotation marks.
Everyone can appreciate the difference between “fresh fish” and “‘fresh’ fish.”
If you’re looking for dinner, avoid the latter.
Just so, if you hear an academic or an academic administrator (or, for that matter, a government bureaucrat) proclaim his commitment to diversity, you can be sure that he means his commitment to “diversity,” that is, conformity masquerading as diversity.
We all know this. It’s part of what Anthony Trollope called “the way we live now.”
I said that this fact was one of the great ironies of our age.
Some might object that it’s really just one of the great hypocrisies of the age.
There’s something to that.
There’s certainly plenty of hypocrisy abroad.
But I remember Francois de La Rochefoucauld’s observation that hypocrisy was the tribute that vice paid to virtue. What he meant was that hypocrisy, although regrettable, at least recognized the claims of the virtue it pretended to embody.
The seamless intolerance that fuels our culture of pseudo-diversity has no room for such recognitions or extenuations.
Conformity and uniformity are the goals, even if they must be packaged in an emollient rhetoric of diversity.
By now, I believe, this phenomenon is widely recognized.
Just a few years ago, when someone described some individuals or behavior as “woke,” people blinked and smiled.
Was woke the same as “enlightened”?
Not hardly.
Like many spiritual toxins, wokeness started life as a lark.
That is, people couldn’t take it seriously, so they laughed at it.
It was ridiculous, so they neglected its claws.
My own sense is that the laughter was misplaced.
It’s not that the whole spectrum of woke self-indulgence wasn’t ridiculous.
It’s just that the ridiculous often cohabits seamlessly with the malevolent, a fact we don’t see or are prepared to excuse because of the silliness.
This often happened in response to the antics of “the ‘60s.”
“Oh, those kids, with their rebarbative music, outré clothes, naïve political ‘idealism’!”
It was easy to dismiss it all as a typical product of self-indulgence and affluence.
That might have been part of the story.
But that sudden change in manners and morals was also fired by something deeper, darker, and less smiling.
The drug culture and sexual license were the tips of that iceberg.
And behind that was the gloomy, unsmiling progress of what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “the long march through the institutions.”
The institutions in question ran the gamut from the family and the churches through schools, colleges, the media, and, finally, corporate and governmental bureaucracies.
That “long march” began on the fringes of culture in the late 1950s before moving to the center in the ‘60s and ’70s.
It proceeded like Johnny Appleseed, dropping fertile if poisonous seeds that took years to germinate and sprout.
Now, they have fully blossomed, as phrases such as “drag queen story hour,” “transsexual bathrooms,” and “white supremacy” remind us.
If someone succumbed to a Rip Van Winkle slumber in 1963, do you suppose he would recognize his culture upon awakening 70 years later, in 2023?
I doubt it.
No one has really explained how this co-optation of our culture came about.
Doubtless, there are many contributory causes.
Reynolds offered a long and complex argument.
Here, I’ll just note two things.
Musk’s tweet underscored the gravity of the phenomenon.
The triumph of wokeness would spell the eclipse of individual liberty and public access to the past.
Orwell warned that we'll know that Big Brother and Newspeak finally prevailed when “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”
The second takeaway from Reynolds’s essay revolves around his suggestion that the homogeneity of woke ideology is a byproduct of the uniformity of the elites that preside over our culture.
There are nine Supreme Court justices.
Until the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, who went to Notre Dame Law School, all were products of Harvard or Yale.
That graphic expression of the monoculture of our elites can be traced throughout the administrative bureaucracy that increasingly controls our lives.
Reynolds noted that real diversity is an effective biological stratagem against dangerous viruses.
His speculations about this are provocative and well worth reading.
Here I’ll just note the possible silver lining to his discussion.
The elite monoculture currently abets the stultifying ethos of woke culture.
It can seem irrefragable and unappeasable.
But its very monolithic nature and totalitarian ambition make it secretly vulnerable.
Successfully attack one element of the monoculture and the whole domino-like structure is liable to fall.
If we had a more diverse ruling class, Reynolds noted, “ideas would not spread so swiftly or be received so uncritically.”
“People with different worldviews would respond differently to ideas as they entered the world of discourse,” he said. “There would be criticism and there would be debate.”
A consummation devoutly to be wished, especially as the alternative is likely to be a totalitarian nightmare.
