Tag: diversity

Tolerance

Tolerance is an essential feature of a flourishing society, but it is a low bar. Jesus of Nazareth told his followers that they should “love thy neighbors as themselves.” This view is widely shared among most religions.

My Afghan friends say Islam is rooted in both love and peace. The Qur’an and Islamic teachings emphasize God’s love and compassion as central, motivating principles, with believers encouraged to love God and one another in return. The Prophet Muhammad is portrayed as a model of mercy, kindness, and tolerance, teaching forgiveness and respect for others, regardless of their beliefs. But the Quran also demands harsh punishments of transgressors, and we have seen horrible acts perpetrated in the name of Islam by radical wings of the religion (e.g. Wahabis in Saudi Arabia and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan).

Like the Qur’an, the Christian Bible also demands harsh punishments of transgressors. Radical wings of Christianity have also undertaken horrible acts. For example, the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol involved participants motivated by radical Christian nationalist beliefs, blending religious rhetoric with calls for violence and anti-democratic actions. Leaders within certain Neo-Charismatic Pentecostal movements promoted the idea of “spiritual warfare,” which helped justify extreme actions among followers.

Most Christians and Muslims ignore these demands in their holy books, which would send them to jail most anywhere in the world. My favorite presentation of the bible’s horrible demands was a scene in the TV series “West Wing”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CPjWd4MUXs.

My question here is how best to promote Jesus’s call to love our neighbors. We are born with the protective instinct to trust those we know and distrust “others”. But with the huge increase in wealth from trade and other interactions and cooperation, dealings with “others” increased. The siloing of religious and racial groups gave way to tolerance, and with greater exposure, tolerance gave way often to friendship. Though some of us were born with an urge to explore and meet new and different people, most are not. Their natural aversion to “others” requires social encouragement to overcome it.

Look at almost any of today’s TV series (especially British). The total mix of black, white, brown and yellow has now become the norm and feels natural. A white man’s boss is as likely to be a black woman as the other way around. This is a wonderful development in which each person is judged on their own talents and character. It is also a more interesting world. But how did we get from the culture of tribalism to our more exciting world of today?

Teaching our children the rightness of treating each person individual on the basis of their talents and character and then exposing them to those not like them was the path. As more white people encountered blacks, they became more relaxed around them. TV shows like the Bill Cosby Show were incredibly important in making normal blacks seem “normal” to whites.

Gays became more fully accepted as more and more families discovered that one of their members was gay. But the TV show Will and Grace played the incredibly important role played by the Bill Cosby Show of demystifying Gays and making the straight public more understanding and comfortable with them. Combined with Jesus’s call to love our neighbors, actual exposure to all types does the job. Companies that want a more interesting (and productive) work environment will go out of their way to hire from all races and creeds. This is an area in which real progress has been made toward a fairer, and more interesting society.

DEI—a nuanced assessment

DEI — “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs or policies are efforts to promote fairness and full participation of people who have been historically underrepresented or subjected to discrimination. The normal standard of fairness when employing workers is that they are hired (or admitted to college) on the basis of merit—who best satisfied to the requirements for the job. This is what taxpayers who want the best results from their tax dollars, want as well.

Many universities set aside the admission of the best qualified students to reflect the fact that may blacks who might have greater potential than their past performance test score indicated because of racial discrimination should be given preferential treatment. But these “affirmative action” programs where struct down by the Supreme Courts 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its companion case against the University of North Carolina, which effectively ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

To make room for more blacks, Harvard had raised the bar and thus discriminated against Asian applicants with higher scores. It is appropriate that the standards of equal treatment and merit should be observed for government jobs and public universities.

But private firms and colleges should be able to hire or admit whoever they want. Both firms and colleges may well want the social benefits from greater diversity. Not only can it make the workplace more interesting but the broadened understanding of different racial and religious groups generates greater social harmony as well.

I don’t know what DEI programs generally did or aimed for and am quite willing to believe that they wasted human resources. However, that is quite different from the desirability of properly educating our children about different races and cultures and the history of slavery and harms of racial discrimination. Along with civics, such instruction belongs in elementary school curriculums. Just as the enlightened treatment of gays, blacks, Muslims and other groups in movies and TV shows has led the way toward better understanding, exposure and education are important for building a better and more accepting society.

The government should not interfere in the choices of private firms and university about the composition of their work forces and student bodies.

Diversity Training

America was founded on the principle that every person deserves respect and equal treatment. While our constitution incorporated an unfortunate compromise by permitting slave ownership in the South, which was fixed after our civil war, many scars remain. Each generation needs to be taught our proper principles and we should do our best to reflect them in our dealings with our fellow citizens of all races and creeds.

As Tom Palmer put it some years ago: “The recognition of individuality, of the uniqueness of each individual, is commonplace in all cultures…. Each human person is unique…. What is less commonly grasped is that we all share something morally significant and that therefore all human beings have legitimate claims to rightful treatment by each other, that is, to respect for their human rights.”  “Freedom is the birthright of all humanity”

I assume that diversity training is an attempt to provide such understanding and to endeavor to remove the remaining scars of historical prejudices. That is certainly an important and laudable goal. But perhaps the new generation would benefit more from a forward-looking, positive approach rather than stressing atonement for an unchangeable past. Diversity is a fun and enriching phenomenon.

Let’s learn more about the cultural and historical backgrounds of our fellow citizens and how and why they or their ancestors came here. Let’s sample their food and music. Let’s rejoice in the diversity around us. Most cab drivers in the DC area are immigrants or immigrants once removed. I enjoy asking them where they or their parents are from. Most of them enjoy sharing such information. Every now and then one of them will reply with sarcasm that they are from Arlington or some such place. And I reply, “Yes, yes, but where did your ancestors come from? We all came from somewhere else” (overlooking our natives).

Diversity is more than a moral duty. It is a unique blessing of the American experience.