Had It in Holland Park

On Diversity

Homogeneity tends to breed greater trust than diversity.  If your neighbor is more like you, you tend to trust him more than if his culture is different. If his culture is different, if he thinks differently than you do, you are not sure what he will do in a situation.   That breeds mistrust.  If his reactions seem strange to you, you are troubled.  You are troubled by what you don’t understand.

So, in a diverse society, the challenge is to find out what the diverse people believe, how they think and allow yourself to say “I can see that. It really is not so troubling.”  

That’s a can be a tall order when your culture and your neighbour’s culture believe in mutually contradictory things:  

Indeed most countries are diverse, but who is doing better at managing that diversity?

Some of the best at managing diversity have very little of it.  (Japan, the Koreas, Portugal, Poland, Albania, Greece, Germany, Scandinavia).    Those who have lots of diversity have different ways of dealing with it.  New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA have passed many laws to encourage diversity, though the degree to which this has entered the culture of these nations is spotty. 

Other have simply given up the ghost:   Yugoslavia split and is still coming to grips with it, Russia split and may split again, the UK and Spain my well split, but splitting will just kick the problem down the road, as many of the resulting nations will still be diverse.    China wants to weed it out, by making everyone Han Chinese, Burma wants to weed it out by killing every ethnic minority.  These are not very pleasant and questionably effective in any case.

The nature of our society in America is diverse and most orators and politicians like to leverage that diversity for political gain, which is not helpful. Perhaps focusing on what brings us together, and not focusing on the things that make us mistrust each other, would be good. But someone has to start.  Will it be you?