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.
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.
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.
It is a practice that not only needs a high degree of social trust, but it is also something you need to grow up with such that it is just the way thing are, they way they have always been. No one even thinks about it. Maybe the Danes themselves don’t even know why they do it. I expect that if you ask them, they wouldn’t know how to explain it an outsider other than this is what everyone does. Don’t you do this? But this kind of natural social structure allows them to do a lot of what they do without ever expending any energy thinking about what they are doing or why? This energy is directed elsewhere. It might be put towards innovation, but it could also be directed towards deepening already strong social bonds.
Diversity, though, stresses this situation right away. New people, outsiders, “diversity,” challenges this stable social environment. A small number can be dealt with graciously. But when large numbers of people come from outside the culture or organization, the group’s energy must be redirected now to cross-cultural communication, translation and enculturation. This is energy that isn’t being spent elsewhere on things like innovation or even just the small actions needed to maintain and deepen the existing group cohesion. Relationships require effort. The more energy you expend getting to know and enfolding newcomers, the less you have to expend elsewhere. This is also why, in a business environment, a high staff turnover is a significant detriment to performance.
When the numbers of newcomers increase to the point where the original people group are no longer dominant, you end up in a situation where a significant part of your cultural energy is spend on cross-cultural relationships. Assimilation and enculturation, enfolding the newcomers in and making them one of you, even if in part, becomes increasingly difficult if not impossible to achieve. Once society is multi-factional, a large portion of its energy goes into navigating the differences and frictions between the groups. Sometimes there are real incommensurabilities that cannot be overcome. They are just too different to assimilate. These differences can create real frictions. Because part of integrating into a new culture means letting go of your old ways to embrace the ways of the new, host culture, doing so requires a kind of cultural suicide. In a way, you have to go through a kind of conversion, you know, repent and believe.
This brings to mind the Christian community. It expands, you might say that it conquers, through conversion, through the process of repenting of your old ways and embracing the new ways of Christ and his community. It is a dying and rising again. You are to give up your old culture and embrace the culture of the community. You are meant to become a follower of the Way. What this means for the church is that it must factor in that a significant part of its energy as a community is intended to be spent in doing active enculturation. When Jesus tells us to go and make disciples, what he is telling us to do is to engage in the process of teaching people how to be Christians. Not just the basics of faith, but the ins and outs of being part of the society that is Christianity. We are a distinct people with our own unique culture and one of our main purposes is imposing that culture on new believers. We are going to expend the cultural energy to make you truly and fully one of us. This is what we are commanded to do by Jesus himself. Its part boot camp, team building, habit formation, the learning of stories and rituals, the learning of our ideas so that you think like us and sound like us. You become part of the team. You become one of the community of Christ, the people of God. We keep teaching you until it is second nature to you, like an effortless golf swing.
But what about all of those innovations, all that energy and dynamism that is supposed to come from diversity? In many ways, its a myth. In most contexts where people talk about this, it is in technical environments. Technique is in many ways its own culture, its own way of thinking and doing. It is the culture of the machine. People who have embraced the global technocracy, have in many ways already shed their native culture to become a “do what works” technocrat. Or they have just grown up within the machine their whole lives. In this sense, even if their skin colour is different, they might find that their ability to slip seamlessly from one technocratic environment to another half way around the world is relatively easy. They are already a fungible cog. As in many things, those who are the early adopters and high performers are often quick learners and make these transitions and adaptations more easily and move more seamlessly between cultures, learning many of the nuances and subtleties of both, or multiple cultures. This is often then projected out across the masses and people think that everyone can do this, when it truth they have just come across a “unicorn,” an adaptive, talented person who can quickly master new skills or situations.
This does make one wonder, speculate, whether or not the technical, machine culture itself, once implemented, doesn’t itself, over time, deaden the innovative and creative within people. There is a level of creative innovation that allows one to make leaps from a society and culture that is not yet technologized, to conceive of machines and technology that had never before been imagined. Contrast this to an already technical society where innovations happen within an already technologized society, optimizing and pushing to the limits an existing system and mode of thinking. Is the nature of a technologized society making us less innovative? Is there a difference between organic enculturation and technical training that over time drives out free emerging innovation in favour of consistent regular performance and outputs? Is the person who was trained to do things the “Walmart Way” less capable of inventing the “Walmart Way?”
This isn’t to say that innovation can’t happen in cross-cultural or cosmopolitan environments. Of course it does. But on the whole, the innovations that do arise, come at the expense of a whole range of downstream costs that society must bear because it must grapple with all manners of people who don’t know the rules. In many cases, even if they do know the rules, their own cultural upbringing makes it hard for them to embrace this new way of doing things. Sometimes the cultures are so different that they really might be incapable of grasping the new way of doing things. It is very hard to teach client obligation and fiduciary duties to someone who was raised in a culture where bribery is the norm and everyone is expected to be looking out for their own interests and taking advantage of someone is seen as natural demonstration of superiority. If you can take advantage of someone, it is expected that you will.
You cannot build a high trust environment that is also diverse and cosmopolitan, unless the diversity is more superficial than real. People look different but are culturally the same. As we just said, great, new ideas can emerge in the cauldron of a cosmopolitan society. But it is more likely is that in this same society you will live with constant tensions, frictions and conflicts. It might be “dynamic.” But a pot of water that is about to boil over is also dynamic. There will be those who can operate in this kind of situation and thrive and do well for themselves, but for the average person, they much prefer, even need, a well functioning high trust society.
“Diversity is our strength” is an idea that seems good in the abstract, but cannot really be instantiated because it runs against the fundamental nature of cultures, languages and peoples and what makes them work at their best: an organic, deeply embedded, unspoken connection between people, a society where everyone is finishing everyone else’s sentences. It is this bond that is stressed, undermined and lost in a multi-cultural environment. So much social energy goes into navigating all the differences between people, that there is increasingly less and less left for higher order activities like creativity and innovation. Just as with persons, creativity emerges out of mastery.