patrick.net

The difference between the discriminations the liberal order allows and those it does not has little to do with any reasonable understanding of justice. At bottom, inclusiveness is merely one aspect of an attempt to turn social life into something like an industrial process in which human beings become components of a machine. To demand inclusiveness is to demand that these human components be distinguished only by reference to the demands of the machine and otherwise be treated as interchangeable. This is why educational certification is acceptable as a distinction, while sex and cultural affiliation are not.

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A basic feature of inclusiveness that explains a great deal of its power is its religious quality. Inclusiveness presents a vision of unity in a world without outsiders and without borders. one in which there is no "they" but only "we." That vision is seen as an overriding goal, always to be striven for, though never quite achieved. Inclusiveness thus functions as a religion, and indeed as the established religion that determines how things must be discussed and what can be treated as real. Every view must align with it to be legitimate, and those who express doubts-the Watsons and Summerses-are treated as heretics.

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Other religions that want to remain socially acceptable must assimilate to inclusiveness and become something other than they were. Respectable Western Christianity has largely done so. In mainline churches, the Gospel is now said to be radically inclusive above all else. In that setting, as in society at large, inclusiveness has become a principle of justification that covers a multitude of sins. Whatever his other qualities, anyone can become superior to the traditionally moral by invoking it. The latter are presumed guilty of bigotry, an unforgivable sin that requires perpetual confession and atonement that are never sufficient to restore the offender's moral standing.

(Footnote: A finding of adverse impact means that the employer is presumed to have discriminated and must prove he did not do so. Employers who want to avoid legal trouble and possible expensive litigation must therefore do their best to make the least successful group at least 80 percent as successful as the most successful group. For a discussion of the disparate impact rule in general, see Wax "The Dead End of Disparate Impact")

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The hard totalitarians of the last century adopted the most activist measures imaginable to bring about unity, up to and including extermination of those who did not fit in. Inclusiveness is much more subtle, but no less thorough. It allows people to be different, or so it says, but does not allow their differences to matter. Differences like purple hair are acceptable, because they have no functional significance. Differences like masculinity and femininity are not.

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What is really going on? A clue that may help answer the question, which has mostly been ignored except by idiosyncratic leftists, is that inclusiveness does not touch the forms of differential treatment associated with the ruling institutions of present-day society. It is notable, but ironically not much noted, that the rise of inclusiveness has coincided with the rise of social inequality with regard to wealth, certified expertise, bureaucratic position, education. Compare Noam Chomsky's comment in Chomsky, Understanding POW: The Indispensable Chomsky pp. 88-89:

Over the long term, you can expect capitalism to be anti-racist just because it's anti-human. And race is in fact a human characteristic-there's no reason why it should be a negative characteristic, but it is a human characteristic, therefore identifications based on race interfere with the basic ideal that people should be available just as consumers and producers. Interchangeable cogs who will purchase all the junk that's produced-that's their ultimate function. And any other properties they might have are kind of irrelevant, and usually a nuisance.

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On such a view, the only legitimate social arrangements are technically rational ones such as bureaucracy, the market, and organized expertise. If other more opaque arrangements have an effect-if ethnicity affects success or young mothers are rarely found in demanding professional positions-something is disrupting the proper functioning of the system, and this is an injustice that must be rectified.

Traditions

Notwithstanding the strength of such technocratic views, man does not live by markets, regulations, and scholarly studies alone. There are basic aspects of life-birth, death, love, hate, family, friends, community, God, the Good, Beautiful, and True-that have to do with other things.

These aspects of life cannot be sealed off from the web of actions and relationships through which we carry on our activities in general. We are social beings and deal with fundamental concerns through settled patterns of life and thought shared with other people. Such patterns make up what is called culture. They are basic to the life of every individual and society and normally reflect a great deal of wisdom, if only because stupidity destroys itself. For this reason, they have considerable stability both within communities and in many respects across them.

Kalb has presented a devastating critique of the utopian project of trying to abolish normal cultural and sexual distinction in the pursuit of a misguided notion of equality. Such distinctions are too intertwined with human life to be ignored or made irrelevant. In fact, the attempt to do so simply leads to their replacement with other distinctions, based on wealth, educational credentials, purported expertise, and bureaucratic status - distinctions which serve the interests of a new class.

This project destroys true community while claiming to pursue it, and results in alienation by reducing people to interchangeable ciphers, stripped of all constitutive particularities.