It gets a little bit weirder by the day, American discourse. This weekend, the idea doing the rounds amongst American pundits was “ideological diversity” — apparently, it was now something to aspire to.

Only no one had really bothered to think about why. In what way. Or for what reason. Is “ideological diversity” a thing? Let’s you and I do what American pundits, intellectuals, and writers didn’t — and bother to actually think about it.

If “ideological diversity” is a thing then every kind of regressive, toxic, obsolete, and disproven ideology should be enthusiastically represented, allowed, and discussed, from Nazism to Maoism primogeniture to Social Darwinism to slavery. Perhaps that is why the pundits arguing over it also saw nothing wrong with, in recent weeks, columns suggesting hanging women for reproductive healthcare, and mass sexual enslavement. But why on earth should and reasonable person relitigate the failed ideologies of the past, that led to war and atrocity? Do you see the absolute, devastating lack of reason, truth, and insight here? Do you see how shallow an idea has to be if we can disprove it in just a few words?

Yet on the other side, there is no pressure within the “ideological diversity” movement to represent the many, many ideologies in the modern world that self-evidently work. What are those? Scandinavian egalitarianism. European post-national union. Social democracy. Canadian multicuturalism. I could go on. There are many.

But you will never once hear these viewpoints discussed in American media, because the proponents of “ideological diversity” will never suggest they should be. American academics don’t study them, American pundits don’t know about them, and American intellectuals don’t write about them. And that tells us that “ideological diversity” is just a feint, a bluff, a counterfeit, a ploy. For what? To keep American discourse retrograde, regressive, stunted, and thoroughly trapped within its existing confines. What are those confines? Capitalism, individualism, and materialism. Unfortunately, the future is made of none of these things anymore — they have run their course. But I digress.

Let us come back to the question at hand, “ideological diversity”. It is not a thing. That is what we say these days when a concept has no solid epistemological footing — it carries no water, it “isn’t a thing”. In this way, it is just the foolish American replacement for a genuine, powerful, and transformative concept: diversity. And that is what backwardness is made of, my friends — replacing authentic ideas with superficial ones.

What is diversity? It is the polar opposite of “ideological diversity”. Rather than the fool’s notion that every absurd and mistaken ideology under the sun should be forever entertained by reasoning people, not matter how badly and often it has failed through history, diversity is the idea that each of us carries within us something greater than the sum of our limited words and actions — the totality of our experiences. They give us a viewpoint, a perspective, a way of understanding the world, that isn’t easily replicated by simply slotting in someone who claims to hold a “different ideology”.

Let me explain, with an example. Why are American’s companies so badly run? Take the example of Facebook. How is it that a company could make so many terrible mistakes, and yet fail to change course in any appreciable way? Yet the same is true across the board. We could say the same for Uber, Tesla, or even most of Wall St, Silicon Valley, or Madison Ave.

The reason is diversity. When companies are run by a single kind of person — in these cases, relatively rich white men, and a few women — what happens is that they build products and services according to their view of the world. In Facebook’s case, that view is something like democracy doesn’t matter, connecting people means making addicting them to likes, and money is the arbiter of a successful organization. But we can expand. Silicon Valley is now notorious for making I-want-my-mommy apps — do my laundry, make my meals, and so on — and that too is because it is run by a homogenous clan of frat-boys who all share more or less similar experiences — the same universities, the same clubs, the same leanings, the same upbringings.

A lack of real diversity, of genuine differences in life experience, of identity, of belonging and growing, which lead to differences in meaning, in understanding, in knowing, in seeing — too often by design — has led American industry to a place of mega-failure, and now it fails to create, innovate, resonate, matter, improve, build, endure.

So diversity — which is a real thing, unlike ideological diversity — impacts how institutions and organizations are run: what they are managed for, how they are managed, what matters and counts to them. And that is because if, say, women and minorities had just a little bit of a say in Silicon Valley, then probably they would say something like: “hold on. More I-want-my-mommy apps don’t jibe with my life experience. The world I have seen is bigger than that. Human necessity and human suffering are much greater than doing people’s laundry. Let’s do something that really matters.”

What really matters. You see, we are diverse in just that way. Different things matter to us. But not all ways of mattering are equal. Those of us who have been closer to the truth and terrible price of human suffering in its truest and deepest forms know a higher and truer kind of mattering, too. It is one thing to deliver meals — and quite another to cure cancer or help the crippled walk again. But unless we have experienced the terrible grief of losing someone to such illness — why would we bother to care much? Diversity. Experience. Human possibility. Truth. Beauty. Passion. Mattering. Do you see how these things are connected now?

Now. Let me return to why diversity is a thing, and “ideological diversity” isn’t. One of the most basic findings in economics and management research is that more diversity equals better outcomes — and that alone tells us something important. Diversity can be operationalized, studied, measured — it makes sense as a concept, and has a rich and deep history. But “ideological diversity” cannot, and so does not. If I say that an organization is “ideologically diverse”, what do I mean? That it has people advocating for rape and torture on board? What possible good could that yield? You see my point.

In fact, the precise opposite is true. “Ideological diversity” is linked with…nothing but folly, blindness, and dimness, as American discourse so amply proves. But more diverse teams are more creative and innovative, more diverse organizations are more succesful, more diverse boards are better at governing, more diverse cities are happier, richer places. Why is that? It is because together, the sum of all our experiences gets us closer to the fullness of human life.

Alone, each of us tend to have a very narrow view of human life. Even the person touched by the grief of losing someone to illness might view that as the only prism. In that way, putting many strands of human experience together in one organization, whether a team, corporation, or even a city yields qualities that are hard to come by individually. Wisdom. Maturity. Courage. Grace. Empathy. Defiance. Resilience.

But if we are to homogenize our organizations in the name of “ideological diversity”, to sacrifice real diversity for the feint that a hundred standard-bearers of the status qup all saying the same thing, only using different words is real difference — remember how American media never discusses, say, Scandinavian social democracy, though it thinks it’s “ideologically diverse”? — then we will lose all these great and noble qualities, too. And that is where America is. It is losing its bearings, day by day. It is giving up the qualities of a civilized society, faster and faster.

First to go were norms of decency. Then, a basic sense of humanity replaced by dog-eat-dog cruelty. And now it is racing to the bottom of the abyss. It is arguing that ideology matters more than human experience, reality, truth. Can you think of other societies that have gone that way? I can. Nazi Germany. Soviet Russia. Many more. But none have ended well.

Umair

May 2018