Motus Mentis

I’ve just read Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It, by James Kalb.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Jim was the original proprietor of the influential blog View From The Right (archived here), which he then handed off to the late Lawrence Auster. (It’s hard to believe Larry Auster has been gone for over a decade now; many of us considered his daily analysis indispensable. But as Degaulle once pointed out, “the cemeteries are filled with indispensable men”.)

Jim is a trenchant critic of our crumbling modern culture, and he writes with clarity and intelligence.

On the absurdity of identifying discrimination with “hate”:

Proponents of inclusion often claim that discrimination based on non-liberal criteria has to do with irrational fear and hatred. No less unreasonably, they could make that claim about almost any choice or reason for choosing. People who join clubs for graduates of State U must hold alumni of other institutions in contempt. Those who take their coffee breaks at Joe’s Diner must hate and fear Bob’s Coffee Shop. Such claims would be silly. They become no more sensible when transposed to considerations of sex, ethnicity, lifestyle, and so on. My innate and acquired tendencies, my manner of life, and the tastes, values, connections, loyalties, and expectations with which I grew up, determine how I am to deal with at least as much as my formal qualifications. There is no reason people should ignore the former but not the latter, even when the former bring sex, culture, and other innate or inherited connections into the picture. [p. 23]

On the narrowing effect inclusiveness (see also my own take on this, here):

An inclusivist society denies the freedom to associate and forces religious and social conservatives, as well as ethnics attached to inherited ways and loyalties, to treat their religion, ethnic culture, and moral traditions as irrelevant to everything that matters. [p.55]

… Liberalism is power that hides itself. In order to make good on its claim to achieve equality and combine it with freedom and democracy, it must keep the people from causing problems by exercising their freedom. “Celebrating diversity” helps it do so by insisting that all beliefs and cultures be given equal credit. The result is that none of them can be allowed to affect anything that matters. All significant decisions must be made by someone who can pass himself off as an outside authority applying neutral standards of human rights, economic efficiency, and administrative effectiveness. [p.58]

Every total State must control or break apart forms of association that compete with it for loyalty and power. Typically the family is at or near the top of the list:

Family life provides an example of the effect of inclusiveness on informal local structures. Men and women differ, and connections between them that build on those differences are basic to all societies. To forbid sex discrimination is to forbid responding to the differences coherently and unaffectedly. It also makes it impossible to provide social definition and support for settled relationships between the sexes. Such relationships become a private matter no different from any informal connection among individuals. The result is to deprive marriage and the family of specific structure and function. They become names for a variety of arrangements, none of which has any authority, because none can be treated as better than any other. The consequence is destruction of definite family responsibilities, fostering distrust between the sexes, fragmented and dysfunctional families, impoverished adults, and badly raised, often abused, children. The official response to such problems, apart from further attacks on sexual and other distinctions, is extension of bureaucratic social welfare systems that displace local arrangements and networks. This response further undercuts family and community life by depriving them of their functions and so makes matters worse in the long run. [p.80]

On the suppression and negativization of culture:

The antidiscrimination principle forbids any particular culture to be authoritative, since this would discriminate against those with a different cultural background. The logical effect is the abolition of culture as such. What cannot be public and authoritative is not culture, but private habit and taste. [p.104]

… the abolition of culture gives prominence to the crudest and most antisocial impulses, and, in the absence of social ties and an attractive conception of the good life, the basis for social cohesion can only be negative. The cohesion of the advanced liberal state therefore depends on hatred of its presumed enemies: racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. [p.120]

There is much, much more. The book is already a decade old, but its analysis is even more pertinent now. Get a copy and read it.