3 ms·

Seeing how crucial diversity is to the success of the US, it's a wonder how places like China, Japan, or Korea manage to get anything done.

• wahern 7y ago
  Seeing as how we're already a diverse place and considering our nominal cultural ideals of equality of opportunity, internalizing a common narrative about how diversity is intrinsically good would seem like a good way to achieve the latter given the former. The superficial logic is largely irrelevant; it's just the typical unsubstantiated post hoc rationalizations we all engage in every day in support of our own self image. One can recognize and accept this while still appreciating the beneficial role of the narrative. Doing so seems requisite to help mitigate the unintended consequences--privileged groups buying into the narrative make it clear that they have a stake in how the narrative is translated into substantive policies. Tying to shoot it down by arguing that there's no evidence that diversity is beneficial would seem to me to be more likely to result in far worse unintended consequences, on the whole, as regardless of the cold logic it would as a practical matter legitimate worse kinds of prejudice. In fact, if everybody internalized the narrative of diversity it might lead to increased homogeneity, which if you believed that less cultural diversity would be better (e.g. permitting more trusting social norms) would make it a paradoxically more rational choice.