Social Matter

‘Groups which aren’t diverse ought to be made diverse’ — that’s the law of the land, with a few small exceptions, tolerated by the law, but not tolerated by respectable opinion. The appeal to diversity tends to be made without any evidence supporting the notion that diverse organizations are better able to meet the needs of the people who rely upon them than organizations of a more uniform composition in race, religion, gender, and behavior.

What distinguishes organizations from ordinary groups of people is in their homogeneity of outlook, behavior, and shared goals. What makes them special is that they’re more coordinated than people from outside the organization. Individuals within that group which are more similar are better able to cooperate.

Although they may miss much about catering to the needs of excluded types of people, that doesn’t really matter as far as the goals of the organization go. Organizations succeed when they fulfill a unique appeal within society better than all of their competitors. They can’t succeed nearly as much, owing to the nature of competition, if they fail to fill a market, military, or ecological niche which must be specific and limited.

The myth of plucky, unique people from completely different backgrounds and cultures who nonetheless form a highly effective organization is just that — a myth developed as a sort of propaganda for the idea that encouraging diversity also encourages success. Star Trek is a fantasy because in the real world, people of different ethnicities within the same species even within the same nation-state often struggle to cooperate effectively.

Aliens from different galaxies cooperating with each other under a common culture (with few of the common features of culture) is sort of an extreme version of the university diversity poster, but nonetheless one that millions of people adore.

In reality, if you need something difficult done on a tight deadline, you need a group of highly coordinated people who share a common culture and outlook. That can be, to a certain extent, trained and formed artificially. But that task becomes more difficult, more expensive, and more alienating the more people of different groups that must be included within the organization.

Encouraging human cooperation is difficult. There’s no technology that solves this problem instantly. Wishes can’t make people cooperate better. Repeated sloganeering can’t make people perfectly homogeneous, even if they’re the same race, gender, religion, and from the same region. It just helps if the people that you’re grouping together share a common background.

This perspective was once taken entirely for granted, but it’s now become impossible to speak, even within a shell of double-talk which avoids trigger words like ‘race,’ ‘gender,’ ‘sexuality,’ and ‘religion.’ The power of national culture is supposed to overcome all those differences — but it doesn’t, and can’t.