Saturday, April 22, 2006

Diversify Celebration

Let's widen our nets to celebrate truth, and not mere "diversity". A very good essay.

It begins:

While preparing to interview a job candidate recently, I studied the website of the applicant's current academic employer, wondering at what sort of college he worked. Now I probably should not have been so astonished at the answer. Among the website's nuggets of inane propaganda was the proclamation, "Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common, celebrate it everyday."

A daily celebration of diversity? Is diversity a "thing"? Doesn't one assign truth values to propositions rather than to things? But we know that this assertion means that no statements are true of all people because people differ too much from one another in their opinions, values, habits, customs, and beliefs -- not to mention gender, ethnicity, and sexual preference. In fact, the differences are such that nothing applicable to all can go by the name of truth. For nothing applies to all. One might as well declare, "I have nothing in common with you; but since you also have nothing in common with me, we have something in common after all. We'll call it diversity. Ergo, let's throw a party!"

One might chuckle at the fatuous diversity drivel masquerading as wisdom, but, to paraphrase the title of Richard Weaver's famous polemic, "Fatuous drivel has Consequences."

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