“Variety is life, uniformity, death.” So said Benjamin Constant in 1814. Perhaps few would challenge the sentiment. But the point is to move beyond sentiment. When does the ideology of variety blind us to the reality of uniformity? How does the individual flourish in an age of Americanization? Constant worried about the health of the individual. He asked when individuals “cast like atoms upon an immense flat plain,” stripped and isolated, formed “people en masse.”1 He was not alone in his disquiet. The great liberal thinkers of the 19th century shared his unease. They honored individual diversity and dreaded its eclipse.
The evidence for the weakening of diversity is everywhere. Today’s celebrants do not notice or want to notice. They serve English-spoken-only diversity as they wear Nike garb, check their Facebook pages, and text their friends. Dwindling biodiversity makes no impression. Global homogenization passes them by. A Mexican journalist recently complained of the impact of the United States: “It’s made us one of the most obese people on earth, because we are now mass consumers of American junk food.”2 The diversity celebrants can’t be bothered. They love diversity, but rarely ask what it means or what its reality is in an age of massification.
Groups and diversity get conflated everywhere. If you have the first, you have the second. A university sets out prerequisites for a course to be eligible to meet new campus “diversity requirements.” In the inimitable language of academics, the first reads: “The course must substantially address conditions, experiences, perspectives, and/or representations of at least two groups using different frames that include but are not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, religion, disability, age, language, nationality, citizenship status and/or place of origin.”3 Do these courses teach diversity—or how to enter data on spreadsheets? Once you tabulate the group and the frame, you know everything worth knowing. Today, diversity spells taxonomy.
The conservative criticism, at least of the campuses, cannot be brushed aside. Conservatives charge that group heterogeneity does not mean intellectual heterogeneity. What is group diversity, these critics ask, with intellectual homogeneity? It’s a good question. Unfortunately, the conservatives rarely use the same optic on other parts of society. They might find a more troubling homogeneity. It’s not language or clothes that is distressing, but the pith of society, including the pastimes of children. Infant strollers with iPad holders do not bode well for individual diversity. Nor does a population that gets its information from tweets and video snippets. This should be more alarming to conservatives than Oppression Studies 101 taught by a tenured radical. Leftists populate some humanities departments, but all these outfits combined hardly compare to the heft of ExxonMobil, Walmart, or Apple. Moreover, unlike these corporations, the humanities suffer serious decline. Each year support and enrollment fall. Construction cranes dot science, medical, and business schools as humanities departments contract and shed faculty. This too should bother conservatives.
Once upon a time, conservatives—or at least one strain of conservatives—offered sharp criticisms of unbridled capitalism. Consider the blast delivered by Thomas Carlyle in his 1829 “Sign of the Times” that denounced “the Age of Machinery.” “Men are grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” He feared the loss of individual diversity. We “stand lashed together, uniform in dress and movement.” Our “civil Liberty” is secured, but “our moral Liberty is all but lost.”4 That conservatism has faded. Today conservatives think the market is dandy for everything from cancer to poverty and first grade. They write books with titles like Two Cheers for Capitalism.5
Diversity has become the ambient noise of our era. We are all diverse all the time: this is the message we hear incessantly. “Diversity at Johnson & Johnson is about your unique perspective. It’s about you.” The advice from high and low, corporate advertisers and private therapists, is “Be Yourself.” Alluring adverts tell us to reach for the sky. Counselors suggest we listen to our inner selves. Must You Conform? asked the title of a classic book of the 1950s by the psychologist Robert Lindner, who also authored Rebel Without a Cause.6 His answer, of course, was “No,” and history has followed him. Today everyone is a rebel and nonconformist—or so we believe. In the age of Americanization we are all different.
To challenge the ideology of diversity smacks of elitism. The critic of society—to follow T.W. Adorno—evokes a “flagrant contradiction.” The critic is not happy with civilization to which “alone he owes his discontent.” He speaks as if he represents something higher. “Yet he is necessarily of the same essence as that to which he fancies himself superior.”7 This problem—to put it less philosophically—dogs the critic of diversity. He or she is the individual that others are not, but at the same time shares the general fate. The great Viennese critic Karl Kraus once declared that, “according to a census, Vienna has 2,030,834 inhabitants—that is, 2,030,833 souls and me.” He stood apart. How else could he denounce a society in which “everyone has individuality, and everyone [is] the same”?8
The “flagrant contradiction” cannot be wished away; at best, it can be recognized and regretted, but not denied. An elite that cocoons in toney neighborhoods often succumbs to self-satisfaction, if not self-delusion. It risks attributing to the common folk the ills that are common to all folk. Talk of the “masses” can easily mislead, as if the masses exist apart from the society that makes us all. The difference between a Porsche SUV and a Ford Fiesta is money, not substance.
We live in an age of populism, however, where elites fall under suspicion. Populism assumes various forms. In the dominant version, liberals, journalists, big city denizens, professors, and government employees constitute an insular class unfamiliar with ‘real’ people. That the attacks on an elite are orchestrated by an elite does not alter the phenomenon. “Political mass meeting: the stadium filled to the last seat, a veritable carpet of people and faces in the ascending tiers; the orator going full steam. He says, ‘The mass culture is to blame for everything.’ Tumultuous applause.”9 This is a fictional event from the 1950s, but captures a truth alive and well today, the riven mentality of a phony populism. Elites attack elites in the name of the masses that partake of resentment toward a society that has turned them into masses.
The minor form of populism flourishes among the liberals and professors themselves; they too believe in the people or least a subsection of it. To any criticism of any advocacy group they respond with celerity and anger. The critic has impugned the integrity and righteousness of those criticized. He or she is an elitist. This pose has long marked leftist scholars of mass culture; they protest any criticism of popular culture as a slur on the people. They find individuality and rebellion everywhere. “Lee Cooper is made to be different so that you can wear your clothing and footwear with a gritty individual look,” runs an advert for jeans and shoes. The critical scholar tags closely behind. It is an illusion, writes a French sociologist, to see “mass standardization” or “the negation of individualism” in blue jeans and current fashions. “Jeans, like any other fashion, are selected, not imposed. . . . Private individuals are always free to accept or reject the latest fad.” Jeans are “the expression of individuality.”10 This stance marks the liberal version of populism; the people are always right.
Some truths are worth repeating. The people are not always right. Nor are their representatives. Nor are the liberals and leftists who defend unreservedly any marginal grouping. Nor are conservatives who govern in the name of the people, however deluded. Worse than elitism is pandering, which is the ill of contemporary populism in its liberal and illiberal forms.
The 19th-century critics of diversity knew something about populism, although the term did not exist. They recognized that the forces of uniformity threatened the individual and democracy. J.P. Mayer was not the only refugee who returned to these 19th-century figures to help understand what had gone amuck in the 20th-century democracies. These scholars grasped that it was not an assault from without, but corrosion from within that ended democracy. We might follow their lead in assessing 21st-century democracies.
Mill and Tocqueville identified trends, not passing events. Neither were optimists. Yet it should not be ignored that they both participated in everyday politics.11 Pessimism does not preclude action; neither does it mystify action, an old disorder. The motto derived from the French humanist Romain Rolland, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” may be too simple, but retains its truth. Towards the end of his long life, during the occupation of France by the Nazis, Rolland encouraged a young partisan, Elie Walach, to retain confidence in the future. “I don’t have to burst my lungs shouting: Mankind marches like a snail (it’s already something if it isn’t like a crab).” Rolland added what Galileo supposedly uttered when forced to recant his assertion that the Earth circled the sun: “E pur si muove! (But still it moves!).”12
And still it does. But today we lack a platform to apprehend the motion and find a way out. The path forward is not clear. Every solution is the wrong one. Nevertheless, it is better to see the situation for what it is than to pretend it is something else. The insistence that all criticism should conclude with ten bullet points of recommendations is part of the problem. “It is what it is” has become a popular phrase to address almost anything; it suggests an angry helplessness or acceptance for things large and small. “It is what it isn’t” might be offered as a counterpoint. Things are not always as they appear. That is the hope.