Reading about the recent terror attack in New York City and how the man who committed this horrendous atrocity was able to come to this country through a program designed to increase our ethnic, religious and cultural diversity, brought to mind a question I've pondered for some time.
That question is, why do we assume that diversity is, on balance, a public good? Indeed, our elites have elevated diversity and multiculturalism to the status of an idol, but how thoroughly has this apotheosis ever been debated?
No doubt diversity adds spice to our cultural life, but I take a contrarian view on whether diversity is an unalloyed good for our polity. I don't see any reason to think it is and several reasons to think it isn't.
A society is strong to the extent that the people who comprise it share values, language, customs and religion in common. These commonalities have been the glue that has held us together for three centuries. As people immigrated into the U.S. they've either largely shared these same features or desired to adopt them and assimilate into our culture, but for the last several decades voices on the left have been telling us that assimilation is somehow a betrayal of the immigrant's home culture, that so far from expecting people to assimilate we should go to whatever lengths are necessary to accommodate the immigrant's desire to keep his or her old ways.
It's no wonder that some who come here want no part of assimilation. They want the benefits of living in a Western country while rejecting pretty much everything that enables the country and its people to provide them those benefits in the first place. Karissa's portrayal of her parents described in this post are illustrative.
The more diverse we are, the more different we are, the less we will share in common and the more divided we will inevitably become. Diversity breeds division, not solidarity. It tends to fragment a society, not unify it.
Because we have traditionally shared what may loosely be called a common culture we've managed for the most part to maintain something approximating national unity, but this has been despite our diversity not because of it. As the cultural gaps between people widen into chasms the bonds that hold us together fray like strands of a rope until eventually we become an unstable congeries of balkanized cultures, sharing little in common, resentful and suspicious of each other.
Those who promote unlimited immigration either don't believe this actually happens, or they don't care if it happens, or they in fact want it to happen. In the first case they're naive, in the second they're foolish, and in the third they're simply malevolent.
Perhaps I'm missing something. If so, I invite readers to help me see what it is about diversity that makes it such a desideratum among our cultural elites.
