“I’m an individual—like everyone else!” I spotted this slogan on a cheap T-shirt on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. It captures the counterintuitive thrust of this book. In the age of mass marketing we boast of our individuality. In the age of globalization—the T-shirt was probably made in Pakistan or Vietnam—we announce our uniqueness. How can these coexist? How can we be both completely plugged in and completely separate? The diversity idea—or rhetoric or jargon—presents the same issues. It celebrates variety in a world that undermines it. Globalization knits the world together into one vast market. We become more alike—and simultaneously we proclaim our differences. Can both be true?
In recent decades the cult of diversity has swept the land. Virtually everybody practices it. Virtually everyone endorses it. Diversity spells decency and openness. Nowadays politicians, CEOs, and police chiefs call for diversity. In the universities, projects and programs pile up.1 We have diversity initiatives, statements, requirements, training, and courses—even diversity officers, who monitor violations of diversity. We teach it, we advertise it, we praise it. To criticize diversity is to invite ostracism; you might as well climb on a desk and yell, “I am a racist and a fanatic!”2
The diversity enterprise has grown so vast it is difficult to know where it starts and where it ends. One thing is clear: Our obsession with diversity is relatively new. One marker might be the 1930s classic Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which was backed by virtually every scholarly organization and whose contributors included the leading lights of the academy. Its fifteen volumes include no entry for “diversity.” Its comprehensive 150-page index has no reference to it.3 Even a five-volume dictionary of the “history of ideas” from the 1970s has no entry for diversity.4
Now encyclopedias and handbooks exclusively devoted to diversity tumble off the presses. Diversity studies has become a minor industry. The editor of the new Routledge International Handbook of Diversity Studies celebrates the “outpouring of academic work surrounding diversity.” The handbook has 41 contributors writing on subjects like “The Diversity of Milieu in Diversity Studies” and “Religious Differentiation and Diversity in Discourse and Practice.”5 An Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education runs four volumes and includes 700 entries.6 A keyword search of diversity of a university library catalog kicks out almost 900 books published in a single year.7
Whence comes the creature? No one seems to know. Peter Wood, in his Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, writes that before the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, diversity was a “fairly marginal idea.”8 In Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell, writing the majority opinion, suggested that universities have a legitimate interest in seeking diversity, which might include racial diversity. In making this argument Powell leaned heavily on a two-page Harvard admissions document, which noted that the applications for admission to Harvard “greatly exceed” the available places; and that by test numbers, high school records, and recommendations, almost all were qualified for acceptance.
If only the top scorers were admitted, the admissions document claims, a monochromatic class would show up in Harvard Square. “For the past 30 years” the admissions committee has believed that the vitality of the educational experience would suffer without variety; “diversity adds an essential ingredient to the educational process.” However, fifteen or twenty years ago “diversity meant students from California, New York, and Massachusetts; city dwellers and farm boys.” This definition occasioned “very few ethnic or racial minorities” on the Harvard quad. “In recent years Harvard College has expanded the concept of diversity to include students from disadvantaged economic, racial and ethnic groups.”9 The formulation was brilliant. It avoided all red flags about racial quotas. It allowed admissions committees to discount scores and grades to admit someone in the name of diversity. It offered a broad idea of diversity that few could contest. It would have a fantastic run, which continues to this day.
Hatched in universities, diversity as a demand and as rhetoric has conquered the cultural world. Even the simplest roadmap of diversity would be endlessly complex. To begin, what is not a sign of diversity? Are race, poverty, and Asian Americanhood equally diverse? What about language spoken, religion, age, sexual orientation, income, and appearance? Or tallness? Left-handedness? And what about political allegiance? Some conservatives have turned the liberal diversity argument on its head. They have argued that college faculties dominated by left-leaning professors lack political diversity; and they have called for affirmative action for conservatives to achieve political parity.10 Why not? Every year a new group pops up demanding representation in the name of diversity. One problem with the diversity jargon emerges: Diversity loses all meaning as it balloons. The term becomes so lax that everything and anything signifies diversity.
But a more central issue never aired by diversity champions or their critics needs to be broached. The world is not becoming more but less diverse. The eclipse of diversity and its consequences are the subjects of this book. The religion of diversity is a response to its decline; it is the new opiate of the people—or at least of the people’s representatives. In a handleless world, it gives people a handle or an identity. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Many immigrants to the United States became more attached to their ethnic identity even as they assimilated. Decades ago the American historian Marcus Lee Hansen posited this as an almost universal process. The second-generation immigrant felt caught between an old and new world. But the more comfortable third generation advertises an old-world identity. “What the son wished to forget the grandson wishes to remember.”11 Yet the grandson—or granddaughter—has already surrendered the pith of old-world identity, which shrinks to symbols and buttons. “Kiss Me. I’m Italian.”
The process that affected immigrants affects almost all today; and as people become less culturally different, they fetishize their differences. The real trend today is globalization, which signifies modernization, even American-style homogenization. We increasingly act, think, and consume like everyone else. The ironic slogan of “I’m an individual—like everyone else!” captures a truth. We differ in pose—and resemble each other in fact. We diverge in lifestyle and converge in life.
Evidently, we enter the domain of vast generalizations, but this applies to the exponents of diversity as well. To the critic, of course, belongs the task of challenging what many see as self-evident: that we live in an increasingly multicultural and diverse world. How can this be doubted? A million speeches, advertisements, and books proclaim it. Our eyes confirm it. Corporations broadcast it. “At Bank of America, we realize the power of our people and value our differences—in thought, style, sexual orientation, gender identity, culture, ethnicity and experience—recognizing that our diversity makes us a stronger company.” Microsoft “capitalizes on the diversity of our people,” which is our “increasingly global and diverse customer base” and our diverse employees, which it itemizes as Asians, Blacks, Disabled, Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual and Transgender, Hispanic/Latino, Parents, and Women. Professors join in: “The most certain prediction that we can make about almost any modern society is that it will be more diverse a generation from now than it is today,” states the Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam.12
But what is this vaunted diversity? For starters, diversity talk today is group talk. By contrast, I concentrate in this book on the fate of the individual, not the group. No doubt, individual and group are inextricably related. People are not born alone; nor do they raise themselves. We are social beings. To have any meaning, however, the individual must be more than a group envoy; and for groups to differ in any significant way, they must be composed of individuals who differ from one group to another. But what if individuals are losing their singularity? How much do groups diverge if individuals that constitute them resemble each other? Moreover, how distinct are these groups if they share identical aims, which usually they do? Groups parade their diversity as they march in formation toward the same goal, American-style prosperity. Their ambitions may be warranted—why should any group be excluded from the benefits of success?—but signify that diversity is an ideology, not a reality. Each group wants to partake of the same good life with the same accoutrements.
For instance, Asian American actors want more roles in Hollywood films and American television.13 Fine. But only in the loosest sense does this entail more diversity. Indeed, it is almost the reverse. The legitimate demand here—and of most outside groups clamoring for representation—is to join the mainstream and enjoy its benefits. Whatever the group and whatever the context—African Americans, Latinos, disabled people, women, immigrants—the issue is always their underrepresentation; and the implicit or explicit argument is that they perform equal to any other people.
Compare this common situation with the less typical one where groups stand outside the mainstream, and only want to stay outside. We do not hear complaints from the Amish or Hasidic Jews of underrepresentation. They wish to remain apart, rare exemplars of difference that seek to remain different. “The Amish are so different,” writes Ira Wagler in his memoir, Growing Up Amish. The Amish reject cars, trucks, electricity, and telephones—and sometimes indoor plumbing. They speak a variant of German; and throughout his memoir, Wagler refers to outsiders as “the English.” He observes of the Amish, “Mostly, they just prefer to be left alone.”14
“We are different,” writes Deborah Feldman in her recent memoir, Unorthodox, on leaving the Hasidic community of Brooklyn. That is the reason the Hasids, she believes, dress in such a conspicuous manner, “so both insiders and outsiders will remember the vast chasm that lies between our two worlds.” That break is to be maintained, not blurred. Like the Amish, language plays a role in keeping the Hasids apart, since they speak Yiddish and distrust English. Feldman’s grandmother warns her that English is “a slow poison.” If she speaks or reads it too much, her “soul will be tarnished.” The whole goal is to keep the main culture at arm’s length. Feldman’s teacher admonishes her that “assimilation was the reason for the Holocaust. We try to blend in, and God punishes us for betraying him.”15
These stances are atypical but are illuminating for that very reason. The Amish and Hasids do not want to “blend in.” They incarnate a diversity that gives a lie to its current form, whose adherents only desire to be let in, not left out. To be sure, most people do not want to dispatch their identities—religious, ethnic, sexual, or something else. But these identities devolve into labels and styles that are employed to open doors. The Asian American actors are saying, We are as talented as non–Asian American actors. We want the same roles. If successful, the representation of Asian American actors will increase in theater and cinema, which will “diversify.” As praiseworthy as this is, diversity here means equality—different-looking people doing the same things as other people.
Much of this falls under the rubric of what is now called identity politics: your group defines your politics. Once we have seen your membership card, we know your basic orientation. Critics of identity politics have not been lacking but have been sidelined or overwhelmed. In many quarters identity politics is the main show. Diversity in these domains does not mean we have more unique individuals, but more contact between individuals-as-representatives of groups. But individual, not group, diversity is my concern. Diversity in its multiple incarnations turns hollow if the individuals are becoming not less, but more alike. And this is happening.
In a period of political regression, I do not want to be misunderstood about group diversity. All groups deserve representation. To end discrimination in any domain is exemplary. But to halt discrimination under the guise of diversity muddies the waters. The demand for equality or justice does not need cultural enhancements. Sometimes more is less. Nevertheless, I do not want the criticism I offer of diversity to be misconstrued. If the choice is between the KKK’s white supremacy and Bank of America’s diversity, I stand with the Bank of America; and sometimes this is the choice. When the US president failed to denounce a racist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, leading American corporations took up the cause of diversity and equality. The president’s American Manufacturing Council collapsed when its CEOs resigned in protest of the muffled stand of the White House. “Our country’s strength stems from its diversity,” stated the CEO of Merck Pharmaceuticals in his resignation. Nor was this an isolated case. Walmart objected to an Arkansas bill that would allow businesses to deny service to same-sex couples. “Every day, in our stores,” Walmart declared in a statement, “we see firsthand the benefits diversity and inclusion have.”16
However, the choice is not often between a virulent racism and an anodyne diversity; and even if it were, criticism of the latter should not cease. To abridge thinking in the name of the emergencies that today are permanent reduces it to slogans, perpetual cheerleading or naysaying. The notion that the current crises require a popular front in which liberals cannot criticize liberalism or leftists cannot criticize leftism partakes of a suspect tradition.17 My object, in any event, is not to criticize the jargon of diversity for something worse, but for something better. To understand what renders diversity ideological is to understand what devitalizes it, an endeavor to realize, not junk it.
The relentless celebration of diversity today overwhelms any skeptics. To posit a decline of diversity seems obviously false. Yet evidence of this fall is everywhere. That it is not more noticed bespeaks both the allure of the diversity ideology and the damage of the intellectual division of labor. The appeal of the ideology taps into a venerable liberal ethos of fraternity that runs from the wildly successful 1955 “Family of Man” photographic exhibition and the equally successful 1985 charity song “We are the World” right into the present, where it is displayed in a thousand ads and promotion videos: the sense that we are all different but all together.18 If anything, “the family of man” ethos resonates today more widely than ever. In the absence of a distinct program, progressives and leftists redouble their commitment to a variegated fraternity. It has become almost their sole calling card.
The damage caused by intellectual fragmentation is trickier to appraise; and, indeed, part of my project here is to retrieve a story that is known but has not registered with the diversity exponents. The decline of diversity as an empirical fact is well-established in several domains; it is a raison d’être for numerous scholars and associations. For instance, specialists, conferences, and entire fields have taken up the cause of declining biodiversity. This means a reduction of environmental diversity and with it the demise of many species. “I cannot imagine,” writes Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life, a problem of greater urgency for humanity than “the ongoing loss of biological diversity.”19
“Biodiversity loss” has accelerated “massively” in recent decades, observe some experts. “Up to 30% of all mammal, bird and amphibian species will be threatened with extinction this century,” they declare. “The loss of biodiversity” leads to greater risks of diseases and disturbances as individual species decline.20 Other scholars draw a direct line between the decline of biodiversity and general health of mankind. “The global loss of biodiversity may lead—directly or indirectly, in the short or long term—to massive loss of health for humankind,” state two specialists. They continue, “The alarm bells are ringing throughout the world among ecologists and also among eco-epidemiologists.”21
Yet the bells that ring to alert us to the threat to biodiversity also ring to celebrate human diversity. Is it possible that humans diversify as the environment homogenizes? That even as the oceans become polluted, the land paved, forests razed, and species eliminated, human variety enlarges? “As industrial-scale farms flourish in the European Union,” summarizes a National Geographic report, “its fields have grown quiet—robbed of the birds that once filled them with song.” Single-crop fields and pesticides decimate the meadow pipits, whinchats, and skylarks. Not only songbirds but also insects decline.22
Does this industrial monoculture nourish human polyculture? To be sure, one might argue that no relationship exists between biodiversity and human diversity; and even as the former wanes, the latter waxes. To make this point, one could suggest a category mistake is at work: “diversity” in the environment and “diversity” in human culture refer to two distinct realms. That suggests a dwindling environmental variety has no impact on human diversity. This seems unlikely. The categories might be separate, but they overlap. After all, the whole point of ecology and eco-everything is the interrelationship of the human and natural domains. I return to this subject in the next chapter.
Diversity is a reality: that is obvious. The first sentences of the first chapter of Darwin’s Origin of Species marvels at “the vast diversity of the plants and animals” across the ages and regions. But diversity is also an ideology; and like any ideology it can mislead and distort. The ideology can blind us to a reality that countermands diversity. Many domains might be examined, but I consider specifically language and clothing in Chapter Two, and childhood in Chapter Three. Each is central to how we live and who we are. They are indexes—and more than indexes—to the diminished diversity in our daily lives. While the importance of language and clothing jumps out, the significance of childhood may not. Yet the experiential platform of diversity is childhood. How we play and imagine informs our ability to experience the world as adults. What if the unplanned elements of childhood diminish? What if the activities of our children become more and more alike?
Diversity is not simply a political or ethnic category. The way we experience the world depends on our orientation to it. Diversity is subjective as well as objective. It relies on an experiential openness, which seems obvious, if difficult to define. What constitutes this openness? A mixture of spontaneity and creativity. Travel, for instance, hardly leads to new experience if the traveler cannot culturally leave home. This is not exactly a new notion. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did a fair amount of traveling, criticized it as a “fool’s paradise.” “I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe” for art or study, he wrote. But he wondered if travel led to individual growth. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples; and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”23 A lighter version of this idea can be found in a recent New Yorker cartoon in which one woman recounts her travels—not Naples this time, but Tuscany. “Florence was fabulous!” she says to an acquaintance. “Wi-Fi to die for!”
Experiential openness is more than an individual quality or virtue; it depends on who we are, how we were raised, what constituted our childhood; and this changes over time for society. I suggest that we are witnessing the closing of experiential diversity, itself based on the eclipse of childhood. To get at this, I turn to the Weimar critic Walter Benjamin, who was much interested in childhood, and wrote the autobiographical “Berlin Childhood around 1900.” Benjamin elsewhere introduced the notion of the “impoverishment of experience.” He wondered whether the dimensions of experience—he was writing in the 1930s—were flattening out. He wondered if we were losing the ability to experience and to recount our experience. The two conjoin. In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin asked if storytelling declined because we lacked a certain patience or tranquility: “the art of storytelling is coming to an end.” Fewer and fewer people can tell a story or want to hear one.
The storyteller for Benjamin belonged to a pre-industrial age. Rapid shifts subverted the storyteller and what might be called first-person experience: “experience has fallen in value.” Newspapers and information overwhelm the narrator who has a quiet tale with a moral. People lived one way before World War I and lived another after. Automobiles, radios, telephones, and film entered everyday life. Society had been overturned. The individual cannot keep up and turns silent. “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds.”24
To put it in terms I’m using here, the capability to experience diversity atrophies. Continuous assault on the individual, which begins in childhood, leads not to volubility, but the reverse. The individual contracts or withdraws. Without openness, diversity is a dead letter. This openness, the opposite of “the impoverishment of experience,” rests on imagination and spontaneity that are themselves grounded in childhood—its rhythms, contours, and play. The universe of childhood is where diversity gets exercise, where it flexes its psychic muscles. Putting aside all the usual qualifications—not everywhere, not all kids—childhood is under siege. The structure of childhood has been dramatically shifting in the last decades. The space, the place, the typical activities of children have been transformed. Impulsive play in the outdoors dwindles as children hurry home to computers or organized activities. Playgrounds seem to be emptying out. Play is changing.
“I live in a neighborhood of several hundred families,” writes Joe L. Frost in his essential A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments. “It is close to a lovely park with a playground and a clear flowing stream.” But he finds that children do not go there except on special occasions accompanied by adults. “In fact, they do not play outside. When they exit the school bus in mid-afternoon, they go directly into the house.” He notes that in the dozen years he lived there, “I have seen as many as three children playing in the yards or streets only one time, and I have never seen an unattended child in the beautifully wooded neighborhood park.”25
The consequences for health are many, but also for the ability to imagine and experience diversity. What happens when video entertainment that is designed by adults occupies the time and minds of the young? When the unorganized dimension of childhood fades? What are the implications of the hollowing out of the psychic and physical space of childhood?
To be sure, the threats to childhood are not new. Elegies for lost childhood mark the modern period. Perhaps the classic of the post–World War II years remains Robert Paul Smith’s 1957 Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing, which for the United States captured the moment when unstructured childhood devolved into activities organized by parents. Smith compared his own childhood of the 1920s with that of his offspring of the suburban 1950s and was stunned that his kids and their friends no longer could play by themselves. We kicked cans, he recalls of his childhood; we skipped and hopped and tied ropes. “We sat in boxes; we sat under porches; we sat on roofs; we sat on limbs of trees.” In short, “we did a lot of nothing.”26 Those days were ending, as Smith saw it. Children no longer played by themselves or with each other.
Social thinkers joined in. Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood dates from 1982. But the fact that the issue has been raised before hardly invalidates it. The refashioning of childhood pastimes, and indeed adult activities, might be accelerating. The warp and woof of experience does not stand outside of history; and as this experience shifts, so does the capacity to experience diversity.
The daily rhythms are altering, not just of infants, but of toddlers, children, pre-teens as well—and everyone else. People are plugged in—and left out. My students text in my classes when I’m ten feet away and stare them in the face. To gauge how experiential openness has contracted across time, choreograph two typically nervous gestures of adults: the once familiar reaching for a pack of cigarettes, pulling out one, lighting, inhaling, and looking up and around; and the now familiar reaching for a cell phone, tapping a code, reading messages, sending messages, reading messages—with head down.
The latter marks progress in health, in the decline of lung cancer, but perhaps regression in openness toward the world. And even the progress of health could be qualified—or, at least, the uptick in pedestrian deaths reveals how people are increasingly encased in themselves and closed off to the world. They walk into cars as they check their messages—or are run over as drivers check theirs. I sometimes greet people with a comment when on a stroll or bicycle. More and more I am met with blank looks. My compatriots hear nothing since they are plugged into earphones. The give-and-take flow of daily life constitutes the bedrock for experiential diversity. If we shut it out, we are left, as Emerson put it, with the unrelenting, identical “sad self.”
And there is something else, which might seem a stretch, but addresses a critical issue: the relationship of play and democracy. Does spontaneous play nurture the individual’s resources that sustain a liberal democracy? And conversely, does the waning of this play stunt talents essential for everyday citizenship? Several scholars connect play and democracy. When children play with each other they learn to resolve conflicts, if only to keep the activity going. “I quit!” ends the game. To mollify and accept opponents may be a vital lesson for a civil society.
“The opportunity to engage in unsupervised childhood play,” writes a political economist, “acts as a school for learning . . . skills required to avoid and resolve the innumerable moments of conflict that fill our daily lives.” In an article subtitled “The Importance of Unsupervised Childhood Play for Democracy and Liberalism,” Steven Horwitz writes that “such play is central to democracy and the liberal order.” The decline of unstructured play bleeds liberal society of something essential. People lose the ability to negotiate disagreements, an aptitude indispensable for civil interchanges. A “coarsening” of everyday life takes place.27
In Chapters Four and Five, I revisit a series of 19th-century thinkers who considered diversity under siege. They valued the individual as the irreducible ground of diversity but feared its eclipse. To use a term that gains currency after them, they worried that individuals were melding into “masses.” It is easily forgotten that the great 19th-century liberals such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were also among the first critics of diversity. To be more precise, they prized diversity but dreaded its devitalization; they feared a looming uniformity would hollow out diversity, leaving it more a shell than substance. The epigraph to Mill’s On Liberty, a quote from Wilhelm von Humboldt, accented diversity. It ran, “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”
At the same time as Mill quoted Humboldt and celebrated individual development “in its richest diversity,” he bemoaned its impoverishment. Mill’s great words defending individual dissent from On Liberty are well-known: “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” But much less recalled is Mill’s pivot later in On Liberty to the other threat, social uniformity, which he feared undermines individual diversity. For England at least, Mill did not see a danger to individual liberties from the state and its minions. Rather, constrictive social conditions impair robust individuality: this troubled Mill. For individual dissent to flourish, so must individual diversity. “There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality were in excess,” he wrote, but that time is past. “Society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.” He called this process the “wearing down into uniformity all that is individual.”28
These same notions imbue Tocqueville’s work, a simultaneous commitment to individual diversity and fear of its future. Like Mill, Tocqueville agonized over the weakness of the individual. He registered again and again an incipient uniformity he found in the New World—and old Europe as well—that debilitates the individual. “Everything is threatening to become so much alike that the peculiar features of each individual will soon be lost in the common physiognomy.”29 This dispirited him about the future of democracy. If the individual has lost independence, then collectively individuals constitute not an informed electorate, but an uninformed mass.
Disparate figures on the left and right—and middle—have weighed in on the fate of the individual. Conflicting prognoses arise from conflicting definitions of the individual. Moreover, some political traditions contest that the individual should be honored at all. Communism of the Soviet ilk prized collectivism and disdained the individual. Soviet lexicons categorized “individualism” as a slur, a bourgeois ailment. For this reason, opposition to Soviet communism extolled the individual. “The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity,” declared Joseph Brodsky, the poet who was expelled from the Soviet Union.30 It seems hardly coincidental that another Soviet émigré, Alisa Rosenbaum, better known as Ayn Rand, made individualism a cult. If this makes sense amid authoritarian collectivism, which Marx long ago denounced as “barracks communism,” does it make sense elsewhere, where individualism is extolled?
In accord with many 19th-century thinkers, Tocqueville distinguished individuality and individualism, which he viewed as opposites. He had no truck with individualism. For Tocqueville and his cohort, individualism connoted a corrosive ideology, sometimes associated with the French Revolution, sometimes with the modern economy; it signified abandoning larger society for narrow self-interest, which had previously been called egoism.31 But Tocqueville and others did not surrender the idea of the individual. On the contrary. They held fast to the individual as something more than an isolated monad; they offered an idea of an individual embedded in wider networks. But what is this creature, the individual, or, more precisely, what should this fuller individual look like? Tocqueville never spelled it out.32 I will follow him in that regard—except to indicate that we need a notion of the individual as more than a passive consumer, as more than a person whose only activity is to choose among items, apps, and goods. The accent in this book, however, is on the countervailing forces that subvert the individual; and the political dangers as the individual loses autonomy. Here, too, I follow Tocqueville, who had feared that a new age of democracy might usher in a new age of barbarism.
Today—again—we see the fragility of democracy, the ease with which it could slide into authoritarian populism. This possibility informs my inquiry. Although the terms were different, the 19th-century critics of diversity understood the peril. This is another reason to reconsider them. Their recognition of the threats separates them from today’s diversity celebrants. If contemporary revelers recognize obstacles, they believe they know the source: reactionaries who resist diversity.
They are half right, but only half. Renewed movements across the globe do oppose diversity in name or substance. They pine for a nation of one race or religion. In Hungary the new populists call for ethnic and religious likeness. “I find it very important,” declared the Hungarian prime minister, “that we should preserve our ethnic homogeneity.”33 But the issue in these pages is not the revanchist programs, which damn themselves, but the processes that render diversity a facade, not a reality, across the political spectrum. In no way am I drawing a direct line between a decline of diversity and rise of a populism or the re-emergence of the masses. I am indicating a subterranean relationship. Uniformity weakens the individual, which in turn weakens democracy. If individuals lose their singularity, they form a susceptible electorate.
This is not exactly news for Tocqueville scholars, or at least was not in the past. One of the pioneers of Tocqueville scholarship who knew something about fragile democracy framed his study of the Frenchman around diversity’s demise. Jacob-Peter Mayer was a German Jewish refugee from Nazism who ended up in the United Kingdom. Among other things, he became a Tocqueville scholar, and editor of the modern French edition of his works. When he first started writing on Tocqueville in the late 1930s, the Frenchman had almost been forgotten. (“Up the present, even in the land of political biography par excellence [England] there is not a single book” on Tocqueville, Mayer declared.)
He broke the silence with his 1939 Prophet of the Mass Age: A Study of Alexis de Tocqueville.34 The title suggested Mayer’s emphasis. He noted in the preface that his book went to press “a few days” before Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which began World War II. Mayer’s concern lay with the preceding events, the popular support for fascism that brought Hitler to power. In alerting the world to “the rising of the masses,” Tocqueville offers “a prophecy, a burden, and a warning.” As a refugee from Germany, Mayer reminded his readers, “It was universal suffrage that led National Socialism to victory. The Weimar Republic was beaten by the ballot, even though force and terrorism later played a part.”35
These events hardly enter my story here, although Mayer’s words are worth pondering. He indicated that Tocqueville identified processes that devitalized the individual and abetted the rise of 20th-century fascism. Tocqueville was not alone in outlining the threats to the individual. By the end of the 19th century, doubts of the individual’s backbone intensified. The vocabulary shifted. The talk was not of the beleaguered individual, but the crowd, the mob, and finally the masses, new phenomena that either betray or typify democracy. We meet the masses again in the 20th century. The diversity sceptics, whom I write about in Chapters Four and Five, anticipated these developments. We should heed them.
To argue that the jargon of diversity masks its decline hardly means we live in a world without differences. It does mean that cultural differences, despite the endless hoopla, do not expand, but diminish. It also means political differences contract. Once a left wing offered an alternative to the status quo, but now it compounds its worldwide defeats with self-delusion. Splintered, it promotes diversity as subversion, narcissism as rebellion. Radicals sponsor what has been derided as the “Oppression Olympics,” which follow the rules of identity and symbolic politics. In the tournament, the categories run from black to trans to fat. Whoever can check the most labels wins. New brackets emerge regularly.
On campuses, shadowboxing has become a new sport for the politically-challenged. Befogged leftist scholars, who learned from their mentors that everything is text, can no longer distinguish a truncheon from a pencil or a rock from an insult. It’s all the same. “Words can be like rape—they can destroy you,” declares a Berkeley professor.36 The logic of this position is clear; first speech, then teaching and writing, fall under suspicion. In a strange transmogrification, campus leftists who once championed free speech now oppose it. They seek to cancel speakers and censor articles they find upsetting.
“We support robust debate,” declare the professors without conviction as they call for the university to stop a speech by a right-wing provocateur, who insults liberals, feminists, and minorities, “but we cannot abide by harassment, slander, defamation and hate speech.” The administration had to remind its distressed faculty of something called the First Amendment.37 But to no avail. The First Amendment no longer cuts it. “The Supreme Court is behind the times,” opines Nancy Scheper-Hughes, an ahead-of-the-times Berkeley professor. “The First Amendment deserves to be re-looked at.” Why? Because hate speech “can harm the central nervous system.”
The incontrovertible evidence for this assertion can be found in the publications of Professor Scheper-Hughes and her colleagues, which, sadly, civil libertarians have not read. “The First Amendment,” declaims this hip prof, “is ignorant of the vast research on these topics by medical anthropologists, clinical psychologists, and neurological scientists.”38 On Professor Scheper-Hughes’s stomping grounds, the First Amendment has become not only a person but a rube ignorant of clinical studies on the injuries caused by free speech. Don’t fret. Trained specialists tap vast research to re-hone the First Amendment for the 21st century. The First Amendment 2.0 allows free speech as calibrated by its effect on the central nervous system. Newly hired censors in the just-established All-University Politburo of Intelligence can’t wait to begin their work—in fact they are already at their desks.39
Elsewhere, real politics shrinks to arguments as to whether the welfare state should be bigger or smaller. Within this framework, passionate and critical differences arise—about health care, environment, education, jobs, guns. These are decisive issues, but all unfold within the structure of the state and economy that virtually everyone accepts. In this sense, fortunately or unfortunately, the best political thinkers got it right, for which they have been roundly criticized. Over an arc of 30 years, from Daniel Bell in The End of Ideology to Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man, they announced that liberal capitalism had triumphed with no alternatives in sight.
“The old passions are spent,” announced Bell in the late 1950s after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which chastened the last Soviet apologists. “The old politico-economic radicalism . . . has lost its meaning.” The only possibilities are limited social reforms. Sweeping changes are off the agenda. “Politics offers little excitement,” declared Bell.40 At the end of the 1980s, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its allied regimes, Fukuyama reaffirmed the message: The end of the Soviet regimes signified the “death” of Marxism “as a living ideology of world historical significance.” And, like Bell, he lamented the loss. Now we could only tinker with the welfare state. Politics had become boring. “The worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism” was over.41
Of course, this is not exactly true. Islamic radicalism has reawakened an ideological fervor. Yet Islamic fundamentalism has not offered any alternative to modernization, except to dismantle it. No matter its numerical strength, radical Islam appeals only to Islamic zealots. The name of the West African radical Islamists, “Boko Haram,” or, as it is usually translated, “Western Education is Forbidden,” requires little commentary. Is there any future without Western science or knowledge? The ability of Islamic regimes such as Iran or Saudi Arabia and, increasingly, Turkey, to balance religious traditions and Western modernity is still unclear; or, at least, the story is ongoing. In any event, this is not my concern here.
One type of difference increases but can hardly be apprehended by the idiom of diversity. Economic inequality and its consequences intensify, but here the vocabulary of diversity illuminates little. A half-fictional exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway addresses the subject and cannot be bettered. To Fitzgerald’s remark that “The rich are different from you and me,” Hemingway supposedly responded, “Yes, they have more money.” This gets it exactly—and can be inverted. “The poor differ from you and me.” “Yes, they have less money.”42
Poverty does not spell diversity, but exclusion. The unemployed, the underemployed, and the unemployable suffer from a lack of money—and everything that goes with it, including good housing, health, and education. A venerable belief posits outsiders as fundamentally different—and often superior. But outsiders may just be insiders without credit cards and nice cars. The poor differ from everyone else by a shortage of resources.
Of late, the accelerating economic inequalities across the world garner much attention—for good reason. But the usual categories of poverty, income, and wealth are revealing. They suggest that the system can be ameliorated without transforming it. For instance, Thomas Piketty’s surprise bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century forcefully takes up economic inequality under rubrics such as “The Capital/Income Ratio” or “Inequality and Concentration.”43 But for him the old working or laboring class hardly exist; the talk is of economic inequalities, not classes. The entry in Piketty’s index for “Labor” reads “See Capital–labor split.” This makes sense because economic inequalities are what interest him, and nothing more. The solutions follow from the approach. To alleviate inequalities, Piketty proposes new tax schemes.44
His concerns reflect the distress of those today indignant at the obscene disparities of wealth. They want to flatten out the polarities. The goal is enviable, but diversity is not pertinent.45 Again, it is more the opposite. The egalitarians seek to enlarge the mainstream. They ask, how we can get more people to escape poverty and join a decent middle class? There is nothing wrong with this aim, but let us be clear-eyed on what it means. The object is to incorporate more people into the establishment.
To the degree the impoverished outsiders are upset, they feel denied what is available to others. But this does not turn them into agents of history, as Japanese organizational theorist Kenichi Ohmae supposes. He blasts Fukuyama in his own The End of the Nation State: “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he declares of Fukuyama’s “the end of history.” Ohmae highlights peoples across the globe who aggressively want to “participate in history” to gain “a decent life for themselves and a better life for their children.” A generation ago they were “voiceless and invisible.” Now they have “entered history with a vengeance.”46
Yes, but under what banner or cause? No one doubts that the globe cries out with unhappy peoples—refugees, the impoverished, the dispossessed. The numbers are daunting. But they have no goal except, understandably, to escape misery and improve their lives. Do the desperate who flee Africa, the Middle East, or Central America have a political program? Even if numerous, they act as individuals, not as subjects of history with a subversive—or any—intent. They do not enter history “with a vengeance.” They seek to slip into history without notice. They do not want to overturn but to get a turn.
One need not be a follower of Hegel to concur that history is a “slaughter bench” in which the happiness of states and individuals has been sacrificed, as he stated in his Philosophy of History. “Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple, truthful account of the miseries” that nations and people suffer, he declared, gives rise “to the most hopeless sadness.” Nor must one be a Hegelian to find resonance in the question he poses: “To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?”47 But here we can diverge from the Berlin sage, who believed he glimpsed reason in history’s machinations. He may have looked in the mirror, not through the window. It is less reason and more its absence that is visible in history today.
The point here is simple. Once upon a time a specter haunted the world, “the working class,” which represented not inequality or poverty, but a different political system. I do not raise this in the name of lost causes, but simply to get a sense of the narrow political diversity of the world we now live in. Marx was hardly interested in inequality or poverty, and indeed frequently lampooned the demand for equality. The working class was not poorer than the peasants; that was never the crux. It was a class with “radical chains” that would refashion the world. The working class may have always been mythological, yet in principle it sought not a place at the table, but a new setting.48
Today the specter is a specter of itself and political diversity turns ghostly. Evidently political differences exist, but the register has narrowed. The hope that a Third World would be an alternative to advanced capitalism and state communism has long since died. Marxism has retreated to graduate seminars where professors serve gluten-free gibberish to aspiring professors. “Two arresting theoretical discourses of the twenty-first century” derive from Greek philosophy, begins a typical article, “The Vectors of the Biopolitical,” by a Marxist poohbah. They are: “Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, provocatively reformulated by Giorgio Agamben in terms of the relationship between sovereignty and the body, and the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.” This article, which opens a special issue of New Left Review, closes with this insight: “Reuniting the vectors potentially provides a means of articulating the politics of this conceptually expanded but biopolitically contracting field. In particular, it allows us to distinguish, in ways that Marx did not, the state of being equally social from that of being socially equal: the first is measured by convergence between vectors, the second by distributions effected by them.”49
Other Marxists no longer even pretend to believe in an alternative to the existing society; they study the vocabulary of state power.50 Outside the campuses a feeble liberalism confronts a rising authoritarianism, populism, and religious fanaticism. Everywhere industrial capital lays waste to the variety of the natural world and undercuts the individual. Meanwhile, the diversity cheerleaders schedule another celebration. “Don’t wait to be hunted to hide,” counseled Samuel Beckett nearly seventy years ago.51 The advice still rings true.