The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (15 page)

But in terms of sheer joy and mirth, all of these things pale in comparison to the news that Barbra Streisand canceled her
Los Angeles Times
subscription to protest
their decision to hire me as a columnist for her hometown paper.

In fairness, her real complaint was that Robert Scheer, a left-wing gargoyle who’d spewed nonsense from the paper’s parapets for years, had been removed from its lofty façade. The fact that I was one of the new columnists to replace him was simply salt in the wound. I suppose it was a bit like having your favorite archbishop replaced with a pagan priest.

“The greater Southern California community is one that not only proudly embraces its diversity, but demands it. Your publisher’s decision to fire Robert Scheer is a great disservice to the spirit of our community,” Ms. Streisand proclaimed in a mini-manifesto that was so syntactically impaired, if it was a horse it would have been shot. She continued:

Now, leave aside the fact that gamuts cannot be diluted and that “principal” is the initial sum of a loan. To dwell on such things would be like correcting Bluto in
Animal House
by telling him that the Germans did not, in fact, bomb Pearl Harbor (“Forget it, he’s rolling”). Of far greater import is Ms. Streisand’s conception of “diversity.”

Let the record show that Robert Scheer’s ethnic lineage and my own are remarkably similar. We both hail in large measure from the same stock of East European Jews and Germans. His parents worked in the garment industry, and so did my grandparents (on my father’s side). Mr. Scheer is, by popular parlance, upper middle class and white. Oh, and I should
add, without much fear of contradiction, that neither Mr. Scheer nor myself are female or gay.

So in terms of the most common understanding of diversity these days—racial, sexual, gender, or ethnic—swapping a Scheer for a Goldberg is a wash, little more than the equivalent of replacing an old mutt with a younger one. Certainly, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton would not be satiated in their demands for more diversity if one of their shakedowns resulted in this sort of personnel diversification.

So when in her role as the voice of the entire “greater Southern California community” she demands diversity, what does she mean? While it sounds like she desires a diverse range of views—she dubs Scheer an “often singular voice of dissent” (see
Chapter 10
, Dissent)—what she actually means by diversity is simpler. She means: “People who agree entirely with me.”

When Barbra says she wants someone to stretch her paradigms (no doubt causing any one of her countless personal assistants and retainers to ask in a double take, “Stretch your what now?”), what she in fact desires are writers who reinforce them. After all, there’s not a micron of ideological daylight between Scheer and Streisand. Indeed, the two are old friends, with Scheer serving as something of an ideological tutor.

But that is beside the point. At one level, for people like Streisand, diversity is a magic word. Anything good supports diversity and everything bad lacks diversity. (Ever notice how in movies the “good” street or prison gang or band of mercenaries is the one that’s diverse? Those rapists and murderers can’t be all bad. Look, there are two black guys and an Asian!)

But at a deeper level, diversity is about conformity. There’s no shortage of horror stories about diversity run amok—from the first responders in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, who were forced to undergo sensitivity training before they could fish drowning people from flooded neighborhoods, to the fire departments that seem to spend more energy fighting for quotas than fighting fires. Some may recall that after 9/11 New York City was embroiled in a controversy over a statue commemorating the truly heroic contributions of the Big Apple’s firefighters. The statue was supposed to replicate the iconic photo of three firemen planting a flag at ground zero. But there was a problem. The three firefighters who actually
planted the flag were white. The sculpture had to be more diverse than that. When people complained, a representative of the black firefighters union opined, “I think the artistic expression of diversity would supersede any concern over factual correctness.”
²

I’ve always loved that term—“factual correctness”—because it captures perfectly the Streisandian attitude. “Factual correctness” has the same stink on it that the right puts on “political correctness.” When confronted with the latest idiocy like, say, the demand to call seminars “ovulars,” conservatives say, “Oh, that’s just political correctness” and dismiss it out of hand. So when confronted with, say,
the truth
, the Streisandian left says, in effect, “Oh, that’s just factual correctness, I’m not going to cave into
that.”
It brilliantly demotes the facts into just another perspective to politely consider but dismiss if necessary (it’s amazing how pragmatism creeps up on cat’s paws, isn’t?).

Diversity is an abracadabra word that magically makes inconvenient facts disappear and forces everyone to get in line. Over two decades ago these stories were already old and their true significance already obvious. In 1990, when the University of Northern Colorado invited Linda Chavez to speak at their graduation commencement ceremony, the intellectual and former government official was honored. But in spite of being a minority and a proponent of bilingual education, she was a Republican, and hence unacceptable to the left’s typecasting. So the students protested. The president of the university met with ninety-five protesting students—exactly 1 percent of the student body—and after the predictable group assault on his status as an insensitive white man, the president relented. In a statement he explained that she had been picked in the first place to demonstrate that the school was “sensitive to cultural diversity” and to “communicate the importance of cultural pluralism.” And why not? After all this is a very successful female Hispanic—a “twofer,” as they say.

But no. The diversity pick was not a diversity pick because Hispanics must embrace the homogeneity of a single worldview that takes it as a given that political correctness is more important than factual correctness. And so the president apologized for the school’s “uninformed” decision and the “appearance of being grossly insensitive” that it fostered. Not just insensitive, but “grossly insensitive.”

Ever since, such stories are so common that they serve as convenient filler for conservative publications and quick column topics for right-wing pundits. To the extent that they are covered in the mainstream press, it is invariably an occasion when the media wishes to join the mob, to prove its own commitment to diversity—hardly surprising given that the dying newspaper industry has some of the most rigid quotas in American life. Even as the newspaper as an institution has been crumbling around them, the members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors have collectively dedicated tens of thousands of hours to figuring out how to make their ranks more diverse. It’s like a ship’s captain watching the vessel fill with water and insisting that the top priority must be to form a bucket brigade that looks like America.

Ah, but diversity makes us stronger, say the newspaper editors and just about everybody else who seeks to barrel past argument to conclusions.

But is it true?

“Diversity makes us stronger” is almost, but not quite, an example of de Tocqueville’s “clear but false idea.”
³
Sometimes it is both clear and true. Stock portfolios are stronger when they are diversified. Steel, concrete, Asian fusion menus, iPod playlists, wardrobes, diets, and travel itineraries are all improved by a diversification of ingredients, choices, compounds, and components.

Of course, this can be misleading. By looking solely at the successful and worthwhile examples of mixing things up we run the risk of coming to the conclusion that diversifying per se is always an improvement. An omelet with red peppers and sausage is better than one with only red peppers. But an omelet with red peppers and kitty litter is not. Adding carbon to molten steel creates the stuff of samurai swords. Adding tapioca to molten steel is less advisable.

And so it is with people. Experts tend to suffer from groupthink. Because worldviews are shared, common conclusions are too easily reached.
⁴
Moreover, because experts tend to believe more than most in the absolute authority of experts, the average expert in the room will defer to the judgment of the superexpert. Groupthink errors have yielded some of the most momentous and calamitous events in history. Some recent
examples include Pearl Harbor, the Bay of Pigs, the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, and, of course, the release of New Coke. This is an area where dissent
is
valuable.

One of the more fascinating counterintuitive facts of life is that the introduction of dumb people can make a group of smart people collectively smarter. Bluntly stated, some stupid people are too stupid to automatically defer to smart people. Remember the story about the truck that got jammed in the tunnel because it was too tall? All the experts were stumped. But some kid yelled, “Let the air out of the tires,” saving the day. This is essentially the moral of the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Substitute kids with morons and you get the same thing. By my count, at least fifteen episodes of the TV series
House
have hinged on this basic insight. The problem is that for every time some idiot says “let the air out of the tires” he will also say things like “let’s put our car keys in the microwave!” or “maybe we can teach grizzly bears to give us tongue baths.” Eventually smart people understandably tune out dumb people and, over time, the fact that a dumb person disagrees is seen as proof that the group must be right. That’s why the best way to avoid groupthink is to have a group of smart people with diverse perspectives, not simply with diverse pigmentations.

There are, of course, other instances in human affairs where diversity strengthens the group. Every good team of doctors contains different specialists. Every military unit has members with a diversity of skills distributed within it. Every magazine is made better by a diversity of writing talents and styles.

On the other hand, the National Basketball Association would be made vastly more diverse if a rigid quota of midgets and one-legged point guards was imposed upon it. But the game would not be improved, and any team that voluntarily adopted such a regime would have very long odds of making the play-offs. It would not strengthen the DVD sales of a porn flick if the content was sufficiently diversified that it included a long tutorial on gardening tips. The NAACP would not be a more effective organization if they adopted a hard quota of Klansmen at every meeting, and the cadres of America’s school crossing guards would not be made stronger with a forced recruitment of more blind crossing guards.

This is a long way of saying the obvious: It depends. Diversity can strengthen a group
or it can weaken it. The problem with the progressive obsession with diversity is that it is a very narrow understanding of the term applied universally. When Bill Clinton said he wanted a cabinet that “looks like America,” he synthesized the problem perfectly. Superficially his cabinet was the most diverse ever, boasting a remarkable number of women, blacks, and Jews. In some instances, as in his search for a female attorney general, he was forced to run through one woman after another (something he was known for in a completely different context as well) as each new nominee ran into various problems getting through the confirmation process. Ultimately he stumbled upon Janet Reno, a staggering mediocrity who served both the country and the president poorly.

More to the point, his cabinet may have looked like America but it acted like what it was—a collection of uniformly liberal lawyers.

Checking off ethnic, religious, and sexual boxes was hardly new in American politics, a fact many conservatives often overlook. Gone may be the days when Italians and Irish demanded their seat at the table, but changing the categories of the various players hardly changed the game dramatically.

The real transformations are closer to the ground. American higher education has grown drunk on a highly distilled spirit called diversity. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, famously declared:

Diversity is not merely a desirable addition to a well-rounded education. It is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare. For our students to better understand the diverse country and world they inhabit, they must be immersed in a campus culture that allows them to study with, argue with and become friends with students who may be different from them. It broadens the mind, and the intellect—essential goals of education.
⁵

It’s a nice sentiment, but not very persuasive. Most of the greatest scientific and literary minds of the last two thousand years were products of educational environments that would hardly count as diverse according to the standards applied by today’s diversity industry. Newton, Galileo, and Einstein had very little exposure to Asians and African Americans. The
genius of Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato cannot be easily correlated with the share of non-Greeks they chatted with around the office well.

Meanwhile, if a lack of diversity is an educational hardship, why aren’t historically black colleges or all-women’s schools in the diversity industry’s crosshairs? Morehouse College is, by all accounts, an exemplary liberal arts college. It is almost entirely black and is all male. Where’s the scandal? What is the problem? Of course there isn’t one. And there shouldn’t be, particularly if you believe that a deep diversity of institutions is preferable to a superficial diversity in any particular institution that is literally skin-deep.