The Left pretends to champion Diversity, but what it actually seeks is conformity to a set of statistical expectations based upon a grossly superficial vision of the species. Its concept of Social Justice, rather than celebrating the true Diversity of Achievement of which we are capable, actually stifles Human Freedom because it tends to expose the silliness of its basic assumptions.
“Progressives,” while frequently stereotyping “conservatives” as religious fundamentalists who believe the Universe was created in six days, love to celebrate their devotion to science and empirical evidence. Their fundamental understanding of human nature, however, is a gross parody of the very notions of Science and Empiricism. As a matter of fact, they distort or ignore every significant factor in the evolution of human thought and behavior in support of the absurd Egalitarian lie that, really, we’re all the same, gross disparities in the historical achievements of various peoples, for example, being no reflection of who they are but simply the result of the deterministic impact of weather and geography or, indeed, the oppressive impact of other humans. I have already mentioned, I believe, Jared Diamond’s masterpiece of “progressive” brilliance, the Pulitzer Prize winning “Guns, Germs and Steel” which simplistically ascribes the success of Eurasian peoples not to anything genetically superior within them but to the fortuitous impact of their environment. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about his book: “It asks why Eurasian peoples conquered or displaced Native Americans, Australians and Africans, instead of vice versa. It argues that this outcome was not due to biological advantages of Eurasian peoples themselves but instead to features of the Eurasian continent, in particular its high diversity of wild animal and plant species suitable for domestication….”
So, Diamond’s hypothesis would seem to be, Plato, Socrates and Aristotle were contemplating the most profound of human issues 2500 years ago while the Indigenous of other continents were still trapped within the Stone Age up until the recent past, because the former had access to better plants and animals! Such is the “scientific” conclusion of the “progressive” Left.
While scholarly studies have shown unequivocally that Men and Women as well as the various Races are programmed somewhat differently, leading them to confront the world in relatively distinctive ways, the Left simply dismisses the Fact of genetic variation within the species. It does not suit its agenda. It’s rationale, of course, is that granting the impact of Biology on what we are inevitably leads to Racist and Sexist stereotypes. But that’s because it also refuses to acknowledge our capacity as Intelligent, Volitional Beings capable of evaluating and prioritizing the proclivities imposed upon us by nature.
The irrefutable Fact is that why we become what we become is utterly beyond the simple-minded explanations of the “progressive” social engineer. Study after study of those subject to daunting economic challenges in their lives show that while some rise to those challenges and ultimately prosper, others subject to the very same circumstances settle passively into a life of squalor. And the millions of dollars pumped into such communities, as the history of the Indigenous here in Canada would suggest, simply cannot rescue those who refuse to help themselves. At the same time, of course, for many people the accumulation of wealth is not a major priority, this but another flaw in the simplistic Marxist approach to the issue of “social justice.”
Life, for anyone with the slightest respect for the empirical evidence, is far more complicated than the Left would have you believe. I am reminded of the many instances in John Horgan’s “The Undiscovered Mind” in which sociologists seeking to have their deterministic view of human behavior validated, had to admit that the results of their studies were disappointing. Yes, our Environment has something to do with what we become, but it is no more deterministic than is our Biology, the ultimate legislator of human outcomes being the ineffable, unpredictable and, in a very real sense, miraculous fact of Human Consciousness.
The philosophers of Ancient Greece took this for granted, as did those of the European Enlightenment. But as Nathaniel Branden points out in “The Psychology of Self-Esteem,” Aristotle was significantly more “empirical” than most of today’s “intellectuals” who, in an attempt to validate their authoritarian Ideology, suggest Western Man’s faith in human intelligence to be a typically “patriarchal” delusion. It is no coincidence that Jared Diamond has written a book entitled “The Third Chimpanzee” which suggests we are really no more than monkeys who got a little too big for our britches. Nicholas Kristof’s 2017 N.Y. Times article entitled “What Monkeys can Teach Us” advances the same thesis as does a good deal of “progressive” literature. It is a notion, of course, which leads directly to the Marxist conviction that all our cultural beliefs and values are merely ways of oppressing others, this the justification for today’s “cancel culture.” You people are just too stupid to have opinions of your own! What our “intellectuals” fail to explain, however, is how in the name of all that is rational, they are somehow exempt from their cynical evaluation of the rest of the species.
In the Ethos of the Left, the most successful among us are disparaged out of deference to the least so, just as Man’s capacity for moral/intellectual insights is disparaged out of deference to those who have rarely shown evidence of either. Hence the notion of “White privilege,” the idea that we in the West are not the benefactors of Europe’s 2500 years of consciously pursued cultural evolution, but merely of the fact that our ancestors were fortuitously blessed with better plants and animals than other civilizations. Profound!
Were a totalitarian Socialist Government to succeed in reducing every one of its citizens to exactly the same economic status, within a year after its demise the gap between the rich and the poor will have begun to widen, ultimately resulting in the very same disparities so repulsive to the “social justice” movement. One’s gender and race are but secondary aspects of one’s Identity, yet it is upon such that the Left bases its expectations of statistical parity which it ironically heralds as a quest for Diversity. But as the real Diversity of the species, that which arises from Man’s capacity as a conscious/volitional being, fails to conform to its simplistic definition of social justice, the Left unabashedly loathes it, indeed, as any number of historical examples will testify, loathes Human Freedom itself.