Amerika

Back in the 1970s even it was clear to me that diversity was a bad idea. In neighborhoods with only one ethnotype, everything made sense; everyone knew what to do, what was rewarded, and what was punished. There were known folkways for every issue and no one was helpless.

Enter the diverse neighborhood or apartment building, as we were in, and you have a complete communications breakdown. No one knows what words to use with each other, or even how to bring up needs or common worries. Instead, they simply avoid talking to each other.

Back when Houston was majority-Anglo, people greeted each other on the street and helped each other out on a regular basis. We knew the ways people interacted and had goodwill toward each other. As it got more diverse, interacting became a risk and people stopped doing it.

When you live in a diverse society, there can be no culture; the only culture is “no culture” so that you do not offend the culture of anyone else! You cannot have folkways, only anti-folkways, so that you do not displace anyone else.

The hard line of reality is that diversity just sucks and it is no one’s fault. Trying to combine more than one ethnic group into the same society leads to failure. Even worse, foreign aid makes us feel good, but creates empire and colonialism, leading to diversity.

This is why the Star Trek geeks developed the Prime Directive:

First introduced in the Star Trek: The Original Series season 1, episode 21, “The Return of the Archons,” the Prime Directive has governed every ship’s crew during their journeys into deep space and beyond.

The Prime Directive was devised to protect underdeveloped alien civilizations from interference by Starfleet, their crew, and the abundance of advanced technology that they possess. The Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet personnel from interfering with the natural development of a society for good or bad, and that has often meant that crews must stand by as an entire civilization is wiped away by natural disasters or technological folly.

This philosophy says that you leave other groups to pursue their own evolution. You do not intervene. You do not help, you do not hurt. You simply observe and then do what your group needs. There is no “we are all one,” only different threads of evolution in parallel.

Naturally, this indicts both colonialism and postcolonialism. If you colonize a place and raise its technology level, the group there has not evolved to the point of being able to develop that technology on its own, therefore is handling something it does not understand.

Similarly, if you refuse to colonize, but simply export products and labor, you introduce a system that none understand which will run amok without your daily guidance. Any interaction with other cultures accelerates their technology beyond their understanding.

Diversity does the same thing. We take people who do not understand what we are doing, bring them here, and expect them to act like us but with suntans. This denies the nature of evolution, which is both hierarchical and niche

Each group adapts to its environment to the level that it needs to rise, and with particular behaviors specific to that environmental niche. No one is equal. We are not the same. We all find the level and the lifestyle that fits us.

Perhaps we do better to remember the Prime Directive.

Tags: colonialism, diversity, postcolonialism, prime directive