The diversity that matters is the diversity of ideas

The woke oppress as they free

(Photo: Shutterstock/Jennifer M Mason)

Greetings,

Given that Vladimir Putin declares he is the heir to tsars, and given that actual tsars tyrannised Russia, I have a piece in the Jewish Chronicle marking the Labour party’s appointment of a “Diversity Tsar” as the apogee of a version of progressive authoritarianism.

Underneath I have added a long read on Christopher Hitchens’ battle to promote freedom of thought on the left.

Hope you enjoy them both,

Nick

P.S. There’s a paywall in there but you can jump it with a free trial as a paying subscriber and unlock all kinds of benefits! (Apologies for the hard sell.)

---

Nowhere is the gargantuan ignorance of the British ruling class more evident than in its determination to assign the title of “tsar” to random functionaries.

The actual tsars persecuted Jews. Many Jewish Chronicle readers will be the descendants of Jewish refugees who fled the tsarist pogroms of the 1880s and early 1900s. Nevertheless, the Conservative government still thought it a good idea to describe John Mann as its “antisemitism tsar”.

The tsars ran their empire by instructing secret policemen to repress dissent. They upheld Russian chauvinism by subjugating Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish minorities.

The historical record did not stop our government appointing a “free speech tsar”. Nor did it stop Labour from announcing that it now needs a “diversity tsar” to promote candidates from, er, minorities.

Perhaps it would bang some historical knowledge into their impoverished minds if Labour and Conservative politicians learned that Putin sees himself as a new tsar and compares himself to Peter the Great.

Would Labour then appoint a “Diversity Putin”? I shouldn’t ask. It probably would, not least because it would welcome the autocratic connotations.

For diversity is at once a liberatory and a repressive concept. The trouble for many on the left is that they invest too much faith in it. The liberation comes when societies remove obstacles that stop women taking senior jobs or people from ethnic minorities encountering racism.

For all the comic efforts to hire someone — anyone will do! — from an ethnic minority after the murder of George Floyd, the result has been an advance in justice for individuals. If prejudice denies you opportunity, then the removal of prejudice can be the most important event in your life. I do not want to underestimate its importance.

But I do not want to overestimate it either. The politics of diversity changes the composition of elites but it does not alter the power structure.

Typically, it allows the replacement of upper-middle-class, privately educated white men with upper-middle-class, privately educated women and people of colour.

An undoubted change, but a change that leaves an unequal society intact.

The refusal to think about class is not diversity’s only flaw. I have little time for the anti-woke right, but it is correct on one point: liberals want diversity in everything, except diversity of thought. When managers call for diversity, what they mean is: “let’s hire women and minority applicants who agree with me.”

By hoping for radical change, the centre-left is guilty of falling for what Bertrand Russell called “the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed”. The belief that suffering ennobles people, Russell said, leads to the bizarre conclusion that the more suffering there is, the better for society.

We can see the fallacy’s failings in our own time. The notion that women are inherently kinder and more amenable to compromise than men has not survived the mass promotion of previously oppressed women to positions of power for a reason that ought to have been obvious.