The Diversity Meme

I am often at a loss when challenged on my conclusion of rather long standing that “diversity,” in the world we inhabit today, is a synonym of conformity. My opponents in the argument make me feel like a conspiracy theorist, one who has some truth to impart but needs a bigger broom to sweep it from under the carpet and into the light of day. It’s not that he doesn’t have the facts, it’s that his facts are too many.

Those who take my side in the argument need not be reminded that for the past few decades, especially in the United States, “diversity” served as the battering ram for all sorts of social and legislative change, effecting a levelling of almost totalitarian dimensions. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the political reaction to this and several other kindred initiatives that has led to the enthronement of Donald Trump and the punitive rending of liberalism in America.

What I need, I have often thought, is an illustration, a “meme” as it is now fashionable to say, something with the simplicity of a cartoon and the immediacy of an object lesson, to show what “diversity” is all about. The other day I seem to have found a suitable illustration, and in this post I should like to share it with the reader.

According to data compiled by the Pew Research Center, the number of 18- to 29-year-olds in the United States who have on their bodies at least one tattoo currently stands at 38 percent. Many have many more than just the one, of course – as it happens, seven out of ten people with tattoos have more than a single one and a fifth have more than five, the median being 4. The singers Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber have 36 and 57 respectively. There are some 20,000 tattoo parlors in the United States – their number increasing by one with every passing day – producing total annual revenues of nearly $2 billion.

Things get even more alarming when we glean from global statistics collected by Dalia Research that, if anything, tattoos are “more popular” among those with “higher levels of education” (32%) than those with “lower levels of education” (26%). In Soviet Russia, where I grew up, tattoos were almost exclusively confined to two classes of males, those in the army special forces and those in the criminal underworld, where these insignia served as paperless accreditation, a kind of occult weapons permit or hieroglyphic sauf-conduit. In the United States, by contrast, one-out-of-three college graduates have tattoos, virtually the same proportion as among “military veterans and those who currently serve in the U.S. Army.”

A large proportion of Americans with tattoos, according to surveys, feel that the ink has “made or shows them as rebellious,” in other words, distinguishes them from the rest of the human herd as refusing to conform – as individualistic, original, daring, different. That 45 million people in America distinguish themselves in the same way is a brilliant meme of diversity. Whatever gave these 45 million people the idea that to be marked out as an individual one must be inked like a sheep?

“Let a hundred flowers bloom,” to quote Chairman Mao. He had the good sense not to say out loud “as long as they are all poppies,” although this, of course, is precisely what he had in mind.

But what Mao actually wrote was, “Letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land.” Whence we conclude that a totalitarian dictator may show a better understanding of diversity in theory than a free nation does in practice.