Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Diversity

With the decline of organized religion, moral guideposts that were based on the Bible are disappearing, and new age ideas are replacing them.  One of these new ideas is diversity.  The Bible says to love your neighbor as yourself, but it doesn't say that that you should live among other people who are different from yourself.  Most of the Bible tells Jews that they should stick together and not mingle with the other peoples that they lived among.

There is no Beatitude that says, "Blessed are the diverse...."

Diversity is a new virtue which has not been espoused by moralists and philosophers over the millennia since Plato and the Jewish prophets thought about such issues.  It's arguable that increased diversity in the Roman empire as it grew larger and larger was one of the factors that led to the "decline and fall" of the Roman empire.  It's also arguable that one of the most diverse countries recently was the Soviet Union which spanned eleven time zones.  Political turmoil has reduced the Soviet Union to a more homogeneous Russia, spinning off Georgia, Kazakhstan, and other "stans" as separate countries.  The same thing happened to the old Yugoslavia under Tito, which degenerated into several countries after a vicious civil war.  It may also be the case in the animosity between Sunnies and Shiites in the Middle East today.  It's not clear that history shows that diversity is a virtue.