Diversity can be useful in some instances (such as higher
education and genetic variation to name some of the few) but in almost every
sphere of human life, diversity is subversive to community and is directly harmful
to individual identity.
A community is a unified
body of people. To have a community,
there must be something common to unite it.
Unity is created when people share things: The things that create the strongest unity
are the same things that give people their individual identity, The things, in
general, are what we call culture. The things which make up a culture, include,
but are not limited to, religion
(the sense of the sacred, ritual practice, and faith-tradition), memory (temporal-spatial and emotional experiences, traditional customs,
and local and genealogical history), and values
(ethical conduct, moral principles, life-goals, the arts, and leisure in
general). It is not a community which
gives the individual his identity, but neither is a community dependent on
individuality: Culture creates both individual identity and community. The individual alone cannot create a culture,
he needs to be part of a community in order to become immersed in its
culture. The community, however, cannot
maintain a culture without the active participation of its individual members. Individuality
and community are mutually dependent:
You cannot have one without the other.
Diversity is the
property of having different elements or qualities in a thing. Diversity is, by definition, contrary to
community. A “diverse community” is an oxymoron. A community needs a cohesive culture to make
it a community. There can be small niche
cultures, such as a “gaming culture,” a “baseball culture,” a “rock-and-roll
culture,” etc. effectively making even smaller communities possible (e.g. the “Warcraft
community”) but these are extremely limited and superficial notions of
community. When one typically speaks of community
in general, the whole extent of religion, memory, and values is evoked. If a given
group of people do not share the same religion, the same memory, or the same
values; if they have vastly different backgrounds, perspectives, life-goals,
and moral principles, than it is no community. One can effectively distinguish communities
by pointing out cultural differences between them.
Because you cannot have an individual without community,
diversity effectively dissolves individuality.
It creates a fragmentation of culture and so weakens the bond between
the individual and the community from which he learns his identity.
There is indeed such a thing as healthy diversity, e.g. a
larger state composed of diverse communities, and there is unhealthy diversity,
viz. no community at all, on account of the lack of unity between persons
within a given area. Any given state can
have a multitude of different communities, each with its own unique
culture. When diversity is promoted within a community, that community begins to
dissolve.
