Should we all be considered to be equal, in every respect?
With respect to potential and ability, I wonder sometimes what brought this tragically misguided notion to the fore. The reality is, no two persons have exactly the same ability, nor can they ever, and therefore, they are not going to be equal in every way, absent outside force, such as we would see from government. That force does not raise the lower-ability person up, but rather seeks to force the more able down to make things “fair.” Therefore, equal opportunity is one thing, a laudable and necessary thing, in the cause of individual freedom. Enforced equality of outcome is another matter altogether and flies in the face of the very concept of individual freedom. It negatively impacts everything it touches.
The very existence of the WNBA would itself suggest that a gender integration of the NBA would not improve the game, nor would diversification of players by height. The total lack of a WNFL is another indicator of this idea of different people, different abilities.
I admit that citing the NBA as an example of anything, given the recent revelations about the corruption therein, is a poor choice of an opener for this piece. And anyway, I’m no longer a fan of the NBA, and haven’t seriously been a follower since Larry Bird hung up his uniform and headed back to French Lick back in 1992. So, shoot me. (I left the NBA because Basketball is not the sport I grew up with, alas! A topic for another column. )
The obvious connection here, though, is one of ability. In my examples of the NBA and the NFL, the central argument is one of physical ability. That one’s fairly easy to track. However, if there are differences there, does it make any sense that there would not be differences in other abilities besides the physical?
The larger topic is the false utopia of enforced diversity and its culturally destructive effects, as opposed to Western values, which, by their nature, allow for differences in ability.
The former has many deleterious effects on the majority culture. The latter is, well, the mess we’ve drifted into. Jonah Goldberg, from an LA Times Op-Ed in 2018:
There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.
I think the real culprit here isn’t immigration or diversity in general, but the rising stigma against assimilation. Particularly on college campuses, but also in large swaths of mainstream journalism and in the louder corners of the fever swamp right, the idea that people of all backgrounds should embrace a single conception of “Americanism” is increasingly taboo.
Jonah is spot on with this one. Lack of assimilation can be laid at the feet of two factors: our misshapen concepts of equality have us also believing the fairy tale that all cultures are equal. I suspect that a lot of the acceptance of people not accepting our cultural values has to do with the amount of negative reporting on our culture.
Let’s be clear about what cultural assimilation is. I usually hesitate to draw from Wikipedia, but this description of the process fits as well as anything, so:
Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society’s majority group or fully adopts the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group The melting pot model is based on this concept.
Doctor Thomas Sowell speaks on the value of assimilation from the negative perspective:
Europe is belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values and which often promote hatred toward the people who have let them in.
“Death to America,” for example, does seem less than accommodating and leaves very little room for negotiation, and if the last couple of decades haven’t made that clear to you, you’re probably a liberal Democrat.
I have no intention of getting into a religious debate about this. Going down that particular rabbit hole gets us into the argument of what is and is not Sharia, which seems to have as many definitions as there are Muslims, and those definitions tend to change minute to minute. In any event, being preached at about religious freedom by a group of people who don’t believe in religious freedom, be they Islamists or Democrats, is a non-starter, from my perspective. The cause of individual freedom is not served by it, nor can it ever be.
Related: When Did It Become Taboo to Defend One’s Own Culture?
Ultimately, what we must measure cultural compatibility by is whether or not any individual — and I mean any individual — supports the concepts put forward by the founders of this country. When you view the situation through that filter, a couple of things emerge. First, you’re going to filter out any Islamists, particularly the extremists who want to tear America down. The second thing that comes into play is that it also tends to remove a good majority of liberal Democrats for the same reason.
But what kind of image are we projecting to the rest of the world, including immigrants? How are our culture and its values perceived by the way we sell ourselves?
Paul Harvey noted back in ‘03 that noise sells.
And, we ourselves are not the only ones that we are unselling. (Is that a word? Oh, well, you know what I mean. ) What kind of message are we sending to the rest of the world? With all the negatives, we send a message of weakness to those who are searching for it. And letting such people into our country unvetted is, as Dr. Sowell indicates, a downright stupid move.
Personally, I find it fascinating and alarming that one political party in this country seems to fall into line rather easily with people who are searching out and utilizing that weakness.
Those are my thoughts this day, in addition to urging that we all offer prayers for the people of Jamaica as they deal with what is likely the strongest storm on record for the region.
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