Language and Cultural Diversity

A foundational assumption of the dogma of diversity, as proselytized on college campuses, is that a community becomes stronger when its members don’t have much in common. And further: When we dwell upon—indeed, fetishize—the superficial differences of sex, race, or ethnicity, we will be stronger still. This is a dumbass idea. Yet it is seldom held up for examination or debate. It should be obvious that no multicultural paradise would be possible at all if its citizens weren’t free to peaceably express their diverse views. Free speech is prior to diversity, as the philosophers say. It is a necessary condition of diversity, and probably diversity’s greatest guarantor. To extol inclusion at the expense of speech is incoherent and unserious—a mere reflex of campus ideology in our era of discontent. Unserious, yes, but not unprecedented.

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from realizing the full import of their activity. These more numerous and more varied points of contact denote a greater diversity of stimuli to which an individual has to respond; they consequently put a premium on variation in action. They secure a liberation of powers which remain suppressed as long as the incitations to action are partial, as they must be in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out many interests.

4 Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.
5 And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.
6 And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.
7 But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man, to profit withal.
8 For to one is given, by the Spirit, the word of wisdom; to another the word of knowledge, by the same Spirit;
9 To another, faith by the same Spirit; to another, the gifts of healing, by the same Spirit;
10 To another, the working of miracles; to another, prophecy; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, divers kinds of tongues; to another, the interpretation of tongues.
11 But all these worketh that one and the self-same Spirit, dividing to every man severally, as he will.