Our diversity obsession in a less diverse world

Given Jacoby's observation that the world is actually becoming less diverse, why do people nonetheless fixate on diversity?  A lot of reasons.

One reason, of course, is that race and ethnicity are still correlated with socioeconomic class, and there are good reasons to want to do something about that. There's now just enough racial and ethnic diversity in the world of the upper-middle class that we can't ignore the fact that other groups exist, but not enough to declare problems solved.

Another is probably romanticism.  Other groups aren't actually that different, both because of the declining diversity of practices in this world and the ever-present universality of human nature.  Nonetheless, historically there has been enough variation in practices between groups that we find it fascinating.  Somehow this always manifests as ethnic dance troupes, probably because it's the sort of thing that can easily co-exist with Little League: People gather in gyms to engage in physical activity with adult supervision on Saturday morning. More seriously, it's very visual and exciting, and invigorating for those who do it.

A side interest of mine is language, and people understandably lament the death of languages.  I'm not interested in persuading people to hang on to dialects that will act as walls between them and neighbors, but I do hope that languages are at least documented before they die.  There's a lot of history encoded in languages, because the distribution of a language tells you something about past migrations. But my interest is in recording the past, not freezing the present into the mold of the past. Frankly, it's a GOOD thing that people in remote villages can speak the same languages as the judges and officials appointed by rulers in the capital city.

Finally, while a more uniform world means more people interacting and sharing the same experiences, we humans remain a tribal species. We instinctively look with caution upon those we see as outsiders, and now we're suddenly able to encounter them because of global trade, standardized languages, etc.  There are people who are only alive today because they successfully ascertained whether the stranger looking at them funny was a Catholic or a Protestant, a Hutu or a Tutsi, a Sunni or a Shia, a Serb or a Croat. This makes us attuned to tribal markers. Yet we have to interact in this global marketplace where cheap travel and rapid migration of workers bring us into contact with people bearing different tribal markers like skin tone, facial features, and hair. No, they aren't infallible predictors of ancestry, as there's huge diversity within groups, but still, some patterns do manifest more often than not. More importantly, whether or not we SHOULD react to those patterns, the masked gunmen at the checkpoint often DO react to those patterns, making our ability to anticipate their reactions a deep-rooted instinct.

Sure, a corporate office today doesn't usually have masked gunmen at checkpoints.  (The Security Professionals at the metal detector wear uniforms and show their faces while providing excellent customer service. :) But we're all descended from people who survived by quickly identifying and steering clear of people from other tribes when relations switched from trade to warfare, so as soon as we look at people we take note of their backgrounds.

Go ahead and deny it if you must, insist that YOU don't see these things, but everyone else does. Bigots note difference disapprovingly, warm and fuzzy people note diversity approvingly, and everyone else at least notes it as an adjective to file away in their mental lists. When I'm learning names and faces in a large group, ethnicity helps me take mental shortcuts to remember.  I'm probably not supposed to admit that, but it's just a fact. My worst nightmare would be to learn names in a room where everyone is the same race, the same gender, and same hair color.

OK, so we're noting difference. We can't avoid that.  The question, then is what to do about that.  Well, suppressing it won't work.  People will just note it even more, and treat it a a forbidden fruit. But that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. Just as we have instincts that note difference, we also have instincts that transcend difference, and those that transcend difference are, frankly, the nobler instincts.

For instance, we react with immediate affection to the face of a baby, no matter what color that baby is.  People feel empathy for the lame and sick and elderly across color lines.  Some of that is surely because the very young and very old members of neighboring tribes never took up arms against our ancestors' tribes, but doesn't change the fact that we have these relationships and affections in common with other tribes.

Also, people experience love and sexual attraction across tribal lines.  We know that this phenomenon is widespread, even when interracial relationships aren't, because so many societies have worked so hard to enforce prohibitions on marrying across lines of color and tribe. If nobody felt an attraction across those lines, nobody else would bother to suppress it.

One of our species' greatest survival tools is trade, and that has always happened across tribal lines.  It's what people have always defaulted to as soon as fighting stopped.  We have conflicting attitudes toward outsiders, simultaneously fearing them and wanting to marry them, wanting to build a fortress to keep them away and build a trading port to gain from them. And trade simultaneously requires diversity (different economic parties having different comparative advantages), promotes it (there's always a greater variety of goods available when people can trade freely), and yet also erodes it (everyone can now enjoy the same things).

Storytelling is an instinct that crosses lines, and we are able to appreciate stories from other cultures.  The main reason Disney is making characters with a greater range of colors and ethnicities is that the basic tropes (heroes and villains, princes/princesses and paupers, etc.) transcend race and ethnicity. Little kids want movies with knights and princesses who look like them, but do the same things as every other knight or princess.

Religion is a human phenomenon that some modern thinkers would denounce, but it's an undeniably powerful and widespread phenomenon. For all the evil that has been done in the name of God, a lot of good has also been done in His name, and many religions cross lines of color.  Malcolm X softened his opinion of white people when he was in Mecca praying next to white people.  Christianity has spread around the globe, bringing out the best (and worst) in people everywhere.  I mean, Koreans are some of the most devout Protestants around, and Filipinos are as Catholic as Catholics can be, and both countries are very far (both in distance and culture) from the places where Christianity was founded and grown.

Our conflicting instincts, universal and tribal, noble and feral, are in all of us. The implicit bias trainers are right to note that we can never fully escape from our responses to difference, but that doesn't mean we need to fixate on it. I'm more likely to connect with somebody by talking about what we have in common than by achieving enlightenment about the profound importance of difference. This doesn't mean that we should never talk about difference and diversity, but I think we'll get farther with common humanity.