Fear of a Monochrome Planet

Diversity From a Global Perspective

Pakistan’s Kalash people, who practice an animist religion, celebrate the start of spring. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Upon conquering Aleppo, Syria’s Islamist rebels vowed to protect minorities and decreed that “In the future Syria, we believe that diversity is our strength, not a weakness." Perhaps future Syria will indeed live up to the now-victorious rebels’ promise. But if so, their Islamist rule will be the exception to the Islamist rule. In Afghanistan, the Sunni Pashtuns have long persecuted the Shi’ite Hazara minority, who were actually the country’s majority prior to a 19th-century genocide. Motivated by Sunni Islamism and Pashtun chauvinism, the Taliban have oppressed the Hazara, as well as other ethnic and religious minorities, throughout their reign. The Taliban’s 2001 destruction of the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan was an attack on Hazara identity specifically and cultural diversity more broadly.¹ In the Shi’ite-ruled Islamic Republic of Iran, Bahá’ís and Sunnis are subject to state-sanctioned repression. In Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State unleashed a campaign of mass murder, displacement, forced conversion, and sexual enslavement against the Yazidi ethnoreligious minority. One Yazidi woman was even trafficked to Islamist-controlled Gaza, where she was subsequently rescued by the Israeli army. That single Yazidi, plus a thousand or so Christians, represent the entirety of ethnic and religious diversity under Hamas’s theocracy.

In the United States, typical headlines about diversity include The Oscars Now Have D.E.I. Rules, but Some Say It’s Just a Performance and Harvard’s Black Student Enrollment Dips After Affirmative Action Ends. But from a global and historical perspective, “diversity” should focus on the cultural and even physical survival of peoples. By contrast, a mismatch between the racial distribution in America and the racial distribution at Harvard is a quintessentially First World problem. (If it’s a problem. Is it realistic or even desirable to expect a country’s demographic breakdown to be precisely reflected across every institution? Wouldn’t that mean supposedly diverse groups are substantively the same and diversity isn’t really a strength?²) A whole-world, as opposed to First World, diversity mindset looks at the big picture. For example, human diversity isn’t threatened by a lack of Korean representation in Hollywood. Rather, it’s threatened by South Korea’s sub-replacement fertility rate, which is now at 0.7 births per woman and falling. As

Ross Douthat

notes, South Korea may face societal collapse as it chooses between steep economic decline or a vast, potentially destabilizing influx of immigrants. Even more ominously, North Korea, with its relatively higher fertility rate, may be tempted to invade its depopulated southern neighbor. Thus South Korea’s eventual disappearance as a nation is a real possibility.

Besides collapsing fertility rates across much of the globe, human diversity is also threatened by the homogenizing effects of cultural imperialism. China’s Sinicization policies in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, which include the detainment of over a million Uyghurs in reeducation camps, fall under this category. So does Russia’s attempted Russification of Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin sees as a fake country, and of its own non-Slavic minorities, which he sees as cannon fodder. In the broader Middle East, Arabization has targeted Berbers in North Africa, blacks in Sudan, and Assyrians and Kurds in Iraq and Syria.³ For religious minorities, Islamization is often combined with Arabization to continue the imperialism that first began with the Muslim conquests of the 7th century. As V.S. Naipaul writes, “Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time; since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved.”⁴ The region’s Christians and Jews, as well as smaller groups like the gnostic Mandaeans, predate Islam’s rise and Arab ethnolinguistic expansion. Yet persecution has driven a dramatic decline in the Middle East’s Christian population, from 20% a century ago to less than 4% today. Jews have avoided the Christians’ fate because they’ve succeeded in establishing, and defending, their own nation-state.⁵ (The Maronite Christians established, but could not maintain, viable statehood in Lebanon.)

Israel’s population largely consists of the descendants of Jews expelled from Muslim lands, as well as survivors of European genocide. It symbolizes diversity against all odds, but of the kind that now makes many in the West uncomfortable: a diversity between, not simply within, nations. After all, statehood, not a DEI statement, is the most powerful guardian of national survival. It’s what protects smaller peoples against the assimilationist drives of the more numerous: Sinicization, Russification, Arabization, Islamization, and liberal “universalism” alike. Nation-states should accommodate internal diversity, but they must also, for the sake of global diversity, preserve the local identity that makes them unique.⁶ Of course, not every people can realistically have a nation-state. The Samaritans, ethnoreligious cousins to the Jews who number under 1000, are unlikely to achieve independence in historic Samaria (the northern West Bank). They, like other stateless peoples, deserve protection. But “deserve” is a fraught word, as revealed in the history of the Jewish diaspora, as well as that of the Armenians, and in the plight of powerless minorities today. Perhaps Syria’s Islamists will live up to their lofty rhetoric and protect the country’s Druze, Kurds, Christians, Shi’ites, and Alawites. But not needing to rely on the goodwill of Islamists is one of the benefits of statehood.

Why does it matter if South Koreans stop having children and disappear as a nation? Who cares if obscure Middle Eastern sects like the Yazidis and Mandaeans are Arabized and Islamized into historical footnotes? Why shouldn’t we, as John Lennon suggests, imagine a world with no countries and no religions, too? Perhaps because no single people bears all the wisdom or beauty of this world; because we are not intended to be the same. Most of us react with special horror to genocide—the attempted extermination of an ethnicity—because we recognize this truth. As Octavio Paz writes, “The extinction of each marginal society and each ethnic and cultural difference means the extinction of yet another possibility of survival for the entire species.” While prophets of the end of history may welcome the “universal homogenous state,” for Paz, “History has thus far been plural: different visions of humanity, each with a different vision of its past and future. To preserve this diversity is to preserve a plurality of futures, that is to say life itself.”⁷ Perhaps the 900 or so Samaritans who still sacrifice sheep on their holy mountain do not, in fact, preserve the possibility of survival for all humanity. Nevertheless, I rather like living in a world in which they—as well as the Ainu of Japan, the Kalash of Pakistan, the Italians of Italy, and other singular peoples—continue to exist.

1. The Hazara are not Buddhists, but have their own folklore associated with the statues, which symbolized their identity.

2. In practice, the goal of DEI is often not even to match a country’s demographics at the institutional level, but merely to advantage previously “disadvantaged” groups without limit. Witness, for example, the Oregon school board that boasts of being “more diverse than it’s ever been” for having no white people.

3. Turkification has also targeted Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians in Anatolia.

4. V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), p. 135.

5. The Palestinians, too, should have sovereignty, for reasons of regional stability if not cultural diversity (Palestine would be the 23rd Arab state). However, unlike say, the Kurds and Tibetans, the Palestinians have rejected multiple previous offers of statehood in favor of revanchism.

6. As regards mass immigration: To appreciate global diversity, you need to travel to other countries; you don’t need every other country to travel to you.

7. Octavio Paz, Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (1987), p. 117.