QED

The ‘Hybrid Vigour’ of True Diversity

sheep IIThe endless debate about diversity misses the point, leaving its champions barking quite deliberately up the wrong tree.  Diversity is indeed worth fighting for. Indeed, it is the source of much of the innovation needed for thriving economies and communities. What a shame that the diversity mongers do not understand their own cause.

What they have delivered is not diversity but enclaves, ghettoes, no-go areas,  silos, inward looking ethnicities that ignore “the other”, that is the host communities, and ultimately bitterness, sullen resentment and a multi-faceted cultural barrenness. Basically, the quest for diversity is in the hands of the wrong people. These are “the identarians”, to use Giles Auty’s very useful phrase.  The most common face of diversity — multiculturalism — has delivered everything except diversity, ironically.

The literature on innovation is a very useful starting place to explore the poverty of current diversity thinking.  Sensible innovation scholars and popularisers recognise the obvious — that real innovation occurs where cultures, disciplines and modes of thinking collide.  Literally collide.  They confront “the other” and, if systemically nurtured, produce something new and valuable.

If the diversity mongers really believed in diversity and its benefits they would be cheering for assimilation. You see, assimilation forces cultures to interact.  And it is that interaction which drives progress. Assimilation, wonderfully, makes us confront our “others”, and it does it routinely — a bit like marriage, actually.

Sheep farmers call this process ‘hybrid vigour”. The intermingling of ideas, approaches, cultures, worldviews, forces the clash of ideas that produces new insights and thinking. This is Innovation 101.  It is, in fact, Popperian science.  Diversity facilitates hypothesis testing!  Diversity is only ever valuable if it is confrontational and interactive.  And having a woman in the room, or a homosexual, or a non-European, may or may not advance diverse, confrontational thinking.  Every scientist knows this.  (Well, perhaps not climate scientists, who seem not to grasp anything but grants).

The diversity brigade doesn’t understand this.  It actually doesn’t want the benefits of diversity, on reflection.  It simply wants …. well, who the heck knows what the diversity brigade wants?  What they seem to want is proportional representation within organisations, cities, regions, communities, institutions.  Get that “other” in, and we will be right.

No, not really.

Thriving societies welcome, find a home for, and process good ideas. From wherever they come.

The classic “rainbow tick” type organisation generally portraysits conception of diversity via a clichéd photo of an Asian, a woman, a few young people and a token white male.  How they depict the range of modern sexualities hasn’t yet been mastered by the marketing gurus, although a thick-wristed, prognathous-jawed “lady” or two would seem to be a popular start.  How on earth does this bunch even approach the task of delivering the real benefits of diversity?  The benefits of real diversity — diversity of thinking — flow from open society thinking, from everyone having permission to question things, from testing hypotheses.

Implementing mass immigration, embracing the homosexualisation of society, cheering the “other”, gets us no closer to real diversity.  It is merely identarian cheering. Of course, all this is stating the blindingly obvious.

These folks don’t really care for diversity, as we know.  They actually want sameness of views, cleverly disguised in a myriad of foreign faces, tattoed females with crew cuts and the forever young, with nary a “pale stale male” in sight. What a pity that this diversity combo delivers but about everything BUT diversity. Yes, genuine diversity is good, and we should champion it relentlessly. Just don’t leave it to the Gramsci-ites and Alinskyites to lead the charge.  They won’t deliver diversity.  Anything but.

Many years ago, a very young Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Trump supporter, all-round genius and, very oddly, a citizen of New Zealand, co-authored a book called The Diversity Myth.  This was a detailed discourse on the impact of the diversity generation on American higher education. The outworking of this quite deliberate strategy of using diversity as a weapon to destroy core Western values is, ironically, to embed Orwellian groupthink on people, who, if allowed to explore genuine diversity, might actually develop co-created innovations for the benefit of all. We need to celebrate not “the other” but “the interaction with the other”.

If “the other” joins in, beautiful things will occur. But the diversity brigade doesn’t want a thriving society.  They want us to die.  you see, they are unreconstructed nihilists.  Diversity is their cover for societal destruction.

The diversity brigade is perpetuating a myth.  Let us call them on it.

13 thoughts on “The ‘Hybrid Vigour’ of True Diversity

  • Jody says:

    This is tangentially related to all this tripe about identity, etc. Jordan Peterson – absolute hero, with a brain the size of Jupiter.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP2WlfTiohw

  • bemartin39@bigpond.com says:

    The topic of this excellent article is one of my hobby horse contentions. I begin with the assertion that “culture”, by definition, can not be “multi”. Culture of a society is a uniquely singular phenomenon of a particular time. It is subject to gradual or even rapid change as the result of altered circumstances and contact with “other” cultures, but it steadfastly remains a singular entity. My favourite simile is that of a pot of paint of any particular colour, when drops of other colours are being added. With a little moderate stirring, the colour in the pot will be altered slightly with the merging of each added hue, but the result will always be a singularly unique colour. Mindless advocates of “multiculturalism” would erect barriers between the host colour as well as between all the different colours added, resulting in a hotch-potch, useless mass, which is what we observe every day.

  • Geoffrey Luck says:

    Or – striped paint?

  • Stephen Due says:

    Sorry, I can’t agree with you that real innovation occurs when cultures collide. You would have to give an example. When it comes to innovation I would be thinking Isaac Newton. No cultural collision there! Germ theory of disease? No cultural collision there. Christianity? No cultural collision there. Music of Bach? No cultural collision there. Euclidean geometry? Gunpowder? Theory of Relativity?

    Some cultures favour innovation, some do not. And of course some innovation is bad, and some is very bad. Euthanasia and Safe Schools are on my ‘extremely bad’ list. State education was a bad innovation in its day in my view. The AHRC was a very bad innovation. Communism has been a bad innovation, repeated a number of times just to prove the point.

    Personally I see little to be gained from cultural diversity or innovation as such. The great innovations, however, come out of strong monocultures in my view. But I agree with you about gender diversity and racial diversity, neither of which are likely to produce anything worthwhile in their own right, in spite of current PC dogma.

    • whitelaughter says:

      Isaac Newton. No cultural collision there!
      – The (English) Newton who used the (German) Kepler’s work to develop laws of planetary motion, had his work vindicated by the (French) Maupertuis & La Condamine, cop-operated and competed with (Swiss) Duillier and (German) Leibniz on Calculus?

      Germ theory of disease? No cultural collision there.
      Developed from the GreekoRoman miasma theory by Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and English scholars; proven by a German priest working in Rome; used by a Hungarian doctor to modernize medicine.

      Christianity? No cultural collision there.
      !
      A Jewish prophet in a Roman province creates a religion that absorbs Greek, particularly Platonic, thought and has Zoroastrian influences. (However the claims of Pagan origins are drivel).

      Music of Bach? No cultural collision there.
      Written music is an Italian creation, and harmonics we get from the ancient Greeks(though the Chinese beat them by a millennia and a half); but equal temperament – the core of Western music – was needed because of the music of the English Dunstable, and a theoretical solution found by the Dutch Stevin…to be implemented by the magnificent German, Johann Sebastian Bach.

      Euclidean geometry?
      Unknown, but as a Greek working in Egypt he would have access to multiple civilizations; certainly the Archimedes screw predates Archimedes and was in use in Persia.

      Gunpowder?
      The early history in China is unknown, but it seems to have reached Europe via the Mongol invasions, and been spurred on by the competition between the rival schools in Nuremberg and Italy.

      Theory of Relativity?
      Are you referring to the theories developed by the Jewish German who had to flee to the USA? He built on the works on countless other scholars; frex Gallileo developed a simple form to resolve one of the arguments against the geocentric model, using examples of being in a a moving ship or carriage to explain why the rotation of the Earth is not felt by those of us on it.

      • Jody says:

        You are wrong on most counts. All the things mentioned are the product of WESTERN EUROPEAN CULTURE, whether from the north or the south. And Bach DEVELOPED equal temperament for music all on his own using the theoretical constructs of another ancient European, Pythagoras. Do not attempt to carve up the European continent into separate identities for the purpose of argument. And it wasn’t a collision, but a deliberate endeavour facilitated by Christian monks who keep detailed and meticulous records in perpetuity.

    • Jody says:

      It’s all just propaganda to keep the ‘bread and circuses masses’ distracted and blindsided.

  • Patrick McCauley says:

    I have always valued what the Italians brought to Oz culture … particularly their celebration and enactment of ‘love’ and ‘marriage’. However I do not find the same value in what the Greeks brought – though it was their culture that first thought of the idea of ‘democracy’. However even to utter these two previous sentences … is considered ‘racist’ … they cannot be uttered … anywhere it seems – except for the few remaining fonts of free speech … one being Quadrant Online. If we cannot even speak sentences like these … what hope is their of any ‘culture’ developing ?… except one manufactured by the deep socialist state hidden somewhere in the ether far away from ordinary people.

Leave a Reply