Tracking the decline …

… When diversity means uniformity | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… diversity, both the word and the concept, has crimped. It serves a strict, narrow agenda that has little or nothing to do with the productive dynamism of living and working alongside people with widely different upbringings and beliefs. Only particular and, if you will, privilegedbackgrounds count. Which is why Apple’s African-American diversity tsar, Denise Young Smith, got hammered last October after submitting, ‘There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.’ She hadn’t bowed to the newly shackled definition of the word, which has now been effectively removed from the language as a general-purpose noun.

The essence of a thing, classically defined, is that which makes it what it is. But what makes this particular thing what it is in particular is precisely what it does not have in common with anything else. This is true of persons as well as things. Diversity is the norm of being.