Diversity or Individuality: Pick One

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.