I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to have seen diversity mutate beyond recognition.
When I was younger, folks would defend the benefits of diversity. A lot of that boiled down to:
Diversity is just one of the ways we’ll be more productive. It’s ethical, too, which is nice!
I don’t know when, but the talk around diversity evolved. People stopped defending it and started exaggerating its importance. Slowly, incrementally, it changed to:
Diversity is productivity.
And it some places, they’ve gone ahead so far that it’s become:
Diversity is our purpose. If it happens to help us be more productive, that’s great. If not, we’re sticking with it anyway.
I can’t be the only person who remembers how diversity was one tool of many, making promises that haven’t panned out.
Look at the five biggest economies in the world. The US and Germany are on the list, but their economies grew before mass immigration and diversity became enforced by law. Their economies are slow and bloated now.
China isn’t diverse. Japan is still in the top five despite an ageing population crippling their economy. I wonder why they haven’t opened their borders to hordes of young, virile foreigners from the third world. Maybe they know what that would cost them, even in purely financial terms.
The fifth biggest economy is India, which is an interesting case. There’s a lot of variety in what it means to be an Indian – the same as the US with its 50 different states. There aren’t many non-Indians living there though.
So either diversity has helped Germany and the US tap into the last drops of innovation and vitality out of their workforce… or it strangles economies and those two are too big to die quickly.
Either could be true. But I don’t China and Japan are quaking from the unity and shared purpose their people enjoy.
Besides, all this talk of diversity focuses on the boring kind. The demographic kind. I’m less interested in if you have a different shade of skin and more interested if you have different ideas.
I like seeing things through new lenses – even if most of those are worse than the Christian take.
And one thing that’s helped me with that is learning that Your Story Isn’t About You.
Once you get that into your muscles, everything becomes clearer.
Here’s how: