Why Diversity Isn't Our Strength

It is one of those phrases that gets thrown out by the advocates of policies like mass immigration and/or DEI, but we don't much talk about why this should be the case.

104. Why Diversity Isn't Our Strength

It seems like an obvious thing to most people, that if you bring a diverse group of people together with a variety of backgrounds, beliefs, opinions and ideas that from this mix will emerge a vibrant, dynamic and creative environment. On the surface of it, this would seem to make complete sense. But counterintuitively, the opposite is true. Like my recent piece arguing that deep mastery is more likely to produce creativity than will constant change and disruption, so too, the argument for diversity quickly breaks down once you examine it more deeply.

Mastery: The Path to Creativity

Communities mirror, in many ways, ourselves as individuals. Just as personal creativity emerges out of mastery, so too group creativity emerges out of a deep bond, a shared ethos, a kind of “spiritual” connection. Sometimes this is labeled a “high trust society.” In this group dynamic, there is something that exists between people that they all implicitly understand. It is like practicing and mastering the piano. The rules of society are so interiorized that not only does everyone know the rules, but everyone can trust that everyone else knows the rules and follows them. Its like your golf swing. The more you are thinking about the golf swing, the harder it is to actually, you know, golf well.

Diversity undermines and ultimately destroys this. Every culture has a language, a set of customs, the way that things are done here. The vast majority of them are picked up intuitively. No one should have to tell you to return your shopping cart. It is one of those things that everyone just picks up on that this is what you do. Everyone know this. Or they should know it. This collective consciousness does work like the building of brain structure in that the more that a community practices these social habits, the more ingrained and reflexive they become, the less energy they demand from a society. This then allows society to focus on other things because they are not expending energy every day navigating the differences between people.

This, of course, does not guarantee that just because your society has a high degree of social trust and a deep bond with each other that it will reach amazing civilizational heights. You can have a very practiced golf swing that is second nature to you and still be merely an average golfer. So too with activities like playing the piano. Hours and hours of practice do not necessarily mean that you will become a concert pianist. At lot is dependent upon your native and inborn abilities. In the same way, every cohesive high trust society does not necessarily go on to conquer the world. Nor does every organization with a strong, unified culture become an innovative dynamo either. Sometimes that is just not who you are. But making concerted efforts to disrupt that environment through forced diversity in a effort to “shake things up” will likely also not create the desired engine of innovation either. Sometimes you either have it or you don’t.

As we just noted, every culture has a language, set of symbols and rules, the various customs, its stories and history, its rituals and so forth. This language, like any other can be learned. The stories can be learned. The rules can be learned. The rituals can be learned. But it takes time and doesn’t happen overnight. Many of the ways of a community are not even apparent to themselves. They are not conscious of many of the things they do. Sometimes these things will surface randomly. And once surfaced, they have to be acknowledged, understood and then taught to the newcomer. Sometimes the subtleties are lost. Then there are those habits that seem so odd to an outsider or newcomer that they might never get used to doing them, such as the one time practice of Danish mothers leaving their sleeping babies outside a café in the pram while they enjoyed coffee together inside.