Well, diversity does indeed carry with it a number of benefits, but it's not in itself a strength, nor a source of strength. In fact, diversity is a centrifugal social force which flings all the various social elements away from each other. Diversity weakens rather than strengthens the body politic, and that weakness must somehow be compensated for in a diverse society or else the society will find itself being ripped apart.
Our differences can readily create polarizing barriers between social groups. When we don't speak the same language or share the same race, ethnicity, religion, history, or values we easily become isolated and alienated from each other, balkanized in our own communities.
We tend to associate with people with whom we share commonalities. We naturally prefer the company of those who are most like us, and we frequently feel uncomfortable in the presence of those who aren't. We tend to wall ourselves off from them.
Our diversity, so far from bonding us together, tends instead to disconnect us from each other.
It's those things we share in common that unite us, which is why sports teams all wear the same uniform and the military makes their recruits do everything they do during their training together. It's one way they build a sense of team.
In order to counteract that centrifugal force a diverse society like ours needs some sort of tether, a kind of gravitational force, to pull us together and preserve a sense of team.
If we truly want to develop a sense of togetherness, of family, its imperative that we stop fixating on our differences, that we reject identity politics, for example, and focus on the qualities we share. Every difference is like a moat that potentially separates us, but every commonality is a bridge that potentially joins us together.
Those who insist upon stressing our differences, who keep picking at the scabs of our history, who seek to build moats are, intentionally or unintentionally, encouraging us to despise each other and making us weaker as a nation. Our strength comes from building bridges, from seeking to genuinely love each other.
Christopher Bedford at The Federalist writes:
Our differences without unifying mores — an anthem, a language, a border, a history, a Constitution, a faith in God — make us weak, and this is deadly.There are many things that make us different, but let's stop obsessing on these, much less celebrating them and start celebrating the things we all share in common, especially those things we all share in common as Americans.
Roger Scruton, one of the finest philosophers of the past half-century, explained the danger succinctly in the stirring and controversial BBC documentary “Rivers of Blood:”All of us need an identity which unites us with our neighbors, our countrymen: those people who are subject to the same rules and the same laws as us, those people with whom we might one day have to fight side by side to protect our inheritance, those people with whom we will suffer when attacked, those people whose destinies are in some way tied up with our own.
