Digital Essay: Conservative for Diversity
I’m digging Google Print. One of my first GP research projects: Checking out Russell Kirk’s use of the word “diversity” in The Conservative Mind.
He referred to it as a society’s “leaven” and had many other kind things to say about it: “Burke loathed the barren monotony of any society stripped of diversity and individuality.” Writing about the progressive Turgot, Kirk said that, if Turgot had his way, “diversity of laws, manners, and opinions should be eradicated, and uniformity enforced for the sake of progress.” Toward the end of the book, Kirk wrote, “The conservative is concerned with the recovery of true community, local energies and co-operation . . . a social order distinguished by multiplicity and diversity.”
Kirk valued diversity in the face of the God of Progress. He didn’t want everyone to become droids in a mass society that plods toward the material paradise of no poverty, death, or disease.
Think of all those sci-fi movies based in future paradises where everyone wears identical uniforms. That’s what Kirk loathed, and he would’ve loathed it, even if the uniforms were deemed necessary to a society’s material progress.
But diversity wasn’t Kirk’s highest good. He wouldn’t have respected diversity at the cost of norms. “Permanent things” is what Kirk called them: truths that have come down to us through different avenues—authority, scripture, tradition—from eternity. They are divine truths that men perceive, albeit often through a glass darkly.
Shift to the irony of Kirk’s use of the word “diversity”: It has become the buzzword of the multi-cultural left.
Supreme Court nominees are expected to reflect America’s diversity. Individuality is to be exalted, even if it violates fundamental decency. No one’s preferences are to be questioned, much less condemned.
For Kirk, diversity was the “leaven” of society. Among today’s left, diversity is the dough itself.
It’s not surprising, of course. Whereas Kirk valued truth and would have subordinated diversity to it, the left doesn’t believe in truth. Relativity, subjectivity, empiricism, solipsism. Those make up its mental landscape.
And they all promote a common cause: the naked will. It’s the naked will—the right to do whatever one pleases, as long as there’s no direct and significant and immediate harm to another—that drives modern thinking.
Diversity, too, serves the naked will. Diversity is its condom, protecting the will and allowing it to thrive, regardless of how ridiculous (Wiccan religious practices), lethal (euthanasia), dangerous (legalization of serious drugs), or disruptive (no-fault divorce).
Why do I care?
Precisely because diversity is a good thing, yet in the hands of the left, this good thing has become a bad thing. It has become a stick that beats down all truth and efforts to strive at norms, and that’s a shame.
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