Some Thoughts On Building A Better World
Some Thoughts On Building A Better World
I will never ever be allowed to lead a DEI session.
I am disqualified on several counts. I have common sense. I have a pragmatic understanding of the practical limitations of DEI initiatives (and thus won’t overstep those limits in a manner that destroys the credibility of the whole concept). And finally, I do not stand to benefit from prolonging the problem in any way.
These are fundamental problems with most DEI initiatives. The people offering them rarely have common sense, let alone understanding of just how far they can go and staying firmly on the right side of those limits. And I have a strong suspicion, which is shared by many on both sides of the political aisle, that most of the DEI change agents don’t want to actually solve the problem, if only because it would mean their funding drying up. You may be arguing that this is a very cynical and deeply unfair take, but the sheer pointlessness and counter-productivity of most DEI initiatives suggest that such programs are the province of academic dreamers rather than practical men.
But if I had to lead a DEI session, I would focus on three basic principles:
First, don’t be a jerk.
Second, give some grace.
Third, be a mature adult.
The first principle is a two-edged sword. On one side, it is perfectly fine to disapprove, for example, of homosexuality. It is not fine to harass homosexuals (or people you believe to be homosexual, which is not always the same thing) and doing so makes you a jerk. On the other side, you should not be pushing your beliefs, sexualities, or anything else into someone else’s face. A vegan who not only preaches the benefits of a vegan diet at every opportunity, but actively harasses people for eating meat is being a jerk – and in doing so, that person is poisoning their minds against vegans.
This sword actually has a third edge. When you make a fuss about something which is fundamentally irrelevant to your situation, very few people will take you seriously when you are making a fuss about something which genuinely is relevant. This sometimes leads to some very nasty situations. The person who pushes vegan beliefs on everyone they encounter will not be taken seriously when they complain there are meat products in the food, because they have already convinced their audience that they are a jerk. Worse, perhaps, having annoyed people to the point of total exasperation and/or murderous rage, their audience might be quite delighted at watching the vegan unwittingly eat meat, even though it is pretty cruel.
Being a jerk is not a good thing. Being on the right side of history does not excuse being a jerk.
(Don’t be this guy. Really.)
The second principle is a little more subtle. We live in a society where there are many differences of opinions, and mistakes, from minor misunderstandings like using the wrong names or pronouns to situations that could easily be (or not) sexual harassment/actual threats. If you assume that everyone who makes an error in pronunciation, as George RR Martin did at the 2020 Hugo Awards, did so out of deliberate malice, racism, some kind of phobia or anything else that didn’t involve a simple accident, you will not only come across as a jerk but also make it harder for people to take it seriously when there is a real problem. If you act on the assumption that there may have been a mistake, and don’t treat it as a de facto war crime, the good guys will be grateful for your understanding and the bad guys will realise they have been called out without being pushed into a corner that will force them to either fight to the death or surrender.
When you blast someone who makes a mistake, they get angry. The angrier they get, the harder it is for them to accept you have a point. If you batter them into submission, they will hate your guts – and that hatred will provide cover for people who are genuinely malicious.
Seriously. Give some grace to people who make mistakes. Turning the other cheek sometimes mean getting slapped there too, to mutilate a metaphor, but it does remove all doubt that you are dealing with actual malice.
Third, be mature.
An immature mind seeks to dominate its surroundings. It cannot tolerate different opinions, from the minor (which Star Trek is best) to the major (which presidential candidate of 2024 was a nanometre better than the other). It is not enough to carve out a space for itself; the immature mind must seek to destroy all other minds, to punish anyone who dares to disagree. Or even to argue that the current tactics used by activists are dangerously counter-productive (such as the university professor who was cancelled for daring to suggest the BLM riots and ‘defund the police’ would actually harm the cause). At base, the immature mind is incapable of comprehending not only that it might be wrong, but dissenters have a legitimate right to raise concerns even if those concerns are not in of themselves illegitimate.
The immature mind is also incapable of comprehending the long-term effects of its actions. In the short term, cancel culture – a common tool of the immature mind, which is incapable of comprehending the wisdom of the observation that the master’s tools will never dismantle be master’s house – successfully scattered opposition and terrorised dissenters into pretending to agree (preference falsification). In the long term, cancel culture not only fuelled unreasoning hatred of cancel mobs and convinced many observers that it was about power and control rather than handing out deserve consequences, but it also made it harder for other observers to point to issues that deserve cancellation and even to call out their allies for terrible behaviour because it was important to hang together or be cancelled separately. As Richard Hanania put it:
“As the Overton window in debates within elite institutions narrowed, so that even people who said unquestionably true things were smeared as bigots, the opposition’s Overton window widened, allowing offenses useful to trolls to gain mainstream currency. Those who were canceled—or the millions who observed with disgust as others were—lost all trust in mainstream institutions like academia and the press. The more one side pretended that innocuous things were harmful, the more the other side pretended that harmful things were innocuous.
After Trump’s 2016 victory, left-leaning elites blamed the result on hate and misinformation. It was at that point that Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook began to censor more aggressively. This spurred further entrenchment on the right, which became tolerant of most forms of open bigotry. In their eagerness to form a united front against leftist attempts to police speech, conservatives, particularly those who were online or leaned toward MAGA, made expressions of bigotry a banner the way some on the left had once used pornography as a First Amendment standard.
People who were actually racists loved these developments and helped push them along. After all, if any offensive thing you say can be brushed off as a joke, then ironic trolls and actual Nazis begin to look a lot alike, and a movement inclined to defend only the former will begin to have a knee-jerk positive reaction to the latter.”
The mature mind, by contrast, accepts the limits on what it can and cannot do. It does not penalise people for having different opinions, even when it disagrees strongly with those opinions. It does not overreach, nor does it infringe on freedom of thought and even freedom of speech. A mature mind is content to accept that it may be disliked, that there are people who think that their actions are inherently sinful, as long as they do nothing to interfere with their life. A mature homosexual, for example, may not enjoy knowing that the people who regard homosexuality is inherently wrong, but they accept that as long as the doubters don’t actually try to stop it.
Being mature means saving your energies for what are real problems. It is reasonable to disapprove of a co-worker who has a bumper sticker on his car leading KAMALA KUM-LA or TRUMP THE RUMP, but that does not give you the right to demand he removes his sticker or remove it yourself. A mature mind would understand that the car was his, and that he feels that he is the sole determinant of what sort of bumper stickers he should have, and therefore not waste energy trying to change him when he would regard such attempt as an attack on his freedom to decorate his car as well as his freedom of speech. (This obviously doesn’t apply if the car actually belongs to the company, in which case the company would actually have the final say.)
If you scream like a banshee at the slightest problem, while refusing to discuss the problem in a serious manner, your co-workers will not take you seriously. And why should they?
A mature mind acknowledges that it has to convince, rather than force, people to agree with it. A mature mind therefore puts together a coherent argument, which it can then defend against challengers, and achieves far more than it’s immature counterpart. A mature mind, therefore, outlines the problem, points to very real effects this has on the surrounding population, and proposes solutions. For example, it is easy to point out the harm when a homophobic co-worker abuses his homosexual colleagues. It is also easy to argue that this is not infringing on a person’s right to have whatever opinions they please, but confronting extremely unpleasant behaviour.
A mature mind is also very aware of the effect it has on others. It understands that its behaviour can be seen as threatening, fairly or otherwise, and takes steps to counter it. It also understands that it takes time for real social change, and trying to push faster than society will bear will likely provoke pushback. It may feel that this is unfair, but it recognises the fundamental reality that acceptance takes time.
Put simply, the mature mind recognises that:
someone has the right to an opinion and,they do not have to listen to it.Why did I write all this?
We live in a world plagued by people who feel that they have the right to push others around, that their causes justify their actions, and that any dissent, no matter how minor, cannot be tolerated. Worse, we live in an age of unprecedented intrusion into our lives. We are no longer granted, in many ways, the privacy of our own homes, or even our own heads. It is no longer possible to remain silent, or to maintain a silence. Silence is complicity, we are told, and we are no longer even able to discuss the problems. If you don’t have the right opinions, you get attacked.
This has provoked vicious pushback, from the tolerance of people who genuinely should not be tolerated to the election of Donald Trump and the rise of many other right-wing populists. The concept of DEI now provokes such loathing that there are far too many people who are willing to throw out the baby as well as the bathwater, and far too many others unwilling to admit that the whole concept went too far and needs to be dialled back sharply before it is too late. (As The Atlantic put it, If Liberals Do Not Enforce Borders Fascists Will.) Worse, this has fed a bitter cynicism amongst the Right (expressed in such statements as “oh look, the thing that never happens just happened again” or “the longer they take to show a picture of the suspect, the greater the chance he is from a favoured minority”) and destroyed trust in everything from the government to the media, teachers, and just about everything else.
In short, we suffer from a problem caused by immature minds. I like to think that the three principles I outlined will make things better. But I am probably being too hopeful.
