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It seems absurd to talk of Diversity as simply the mixing of nice Indian exchange students or Chinese businessmen's sons seeking a career. When talking of a diverse society, people speak of them as ideal and tolerant places. Having lived in a few, my reaction is more skeptical.
This immediately becomes difficult to believe when one observes even just the effect of migrating to the US by Mexicans reared in a different culture. Where back in small villages in Mexico there were social controls on young men and a clear set of expectations and punishments, there are an entirely different set in the US. Young men needing to show that they are men pick up on the old show of force coupled with the urban underclass resentment and disdain for education of both rural Mexico and the underclass culture they are assimilating into.
A lack of education is far less problematic in a rural village and men have always needed to show they are independent. The difference is that a lack of education is a major hindrance to the urbanized and technological society that is the US. The different social evolution of Mexican society had its own means of restraining the violence of young men but the aversion of Americans to use force or to condemn a person disarms them in the face of such aggressiveness. The expectation in Mexican villages is that the larger community will know the troublemakers and being willing to deal with them in various ways. The more anonymous American society is averse to violating a person's privacy in such ways.
Every solution breeds new problems.
This gets to the heart of social evolution as the changes made to accommodate one problem alter the overall situation accentuate features at another part of the society.
Mexican society is the evolution of the myriad ways to deal with certain problems. Just as Russian engineering culture evolved radically differently from American engineering when approaching the same problems, the divergences are due to selecting a different technique to deal with the same problem. No technique or situation is identical and so they bring different effects that create yet more situations to deal with and thus does the circle continue.
When the social evolution of Mexican villages resulted in different attitudes than American social evolution demands. The result is a mutual disdain in some parts, a mutual meeting in others and a whole lot of stress everywhere else. The meeting in some parts is seen in the Mexican men who join the Marines and put their youthful aggressiveness to socially useful purpose. The hostility between Mexican gangs and Black gangs is famous and both attack the societies of each others trying to drive them out. The reason is partly out of hatred and partly out of trying to expand the social environment they can operate in. In other areas more educated Mexicans can use their numbers to invoke White Guilt and to pose as the defenders of the downtrodden poor Mexicans.
The downside of this diversity is that there is an ethnic conflict between poor Mexicans (most Mexicans are poor) and Blacks, there is a large Mexican underclass beholden to Nationalist feelings egged on by richer members of their community hostile to the larger American society. The effect is to create a large and dangerous division between faction of American society.
From Shrinkwrapped:
One of Murphy's laws that is germane to this discussion is that "Nature always sides with the hidden flaw." Simply put, when a system is deeply stressed, any flaws become fault lines. To the extent that we favor a status quo that minimizes individual differences in the interest of a social compact based on designed to provide the illusion of absolute equality, we are setting ourselves up for significant social problems.
Ultimately, when there are different ways of doing something, there needs to be a decision mechanism. If the question is if raped women should be comforted and helped in prosecuting their aggressors or if they should be stoned, a population divided between the two philosophies will not resolve the problem. They will not meet in the middle and say "fine, stone them but stone the rapist too". The two positions are irremediably opposed. If the positions of both philosophies are about equal, there will be a painful stalemate until demographics, conversion, or force resolve the dispute in the favor of one or the other. Diversity is no help if it can lead to an impasse. Diversity helps if it broadens perspective but not towards forcing rival factions.
All would describe Bosnia as Diverse. The mutual hatreds and suspicions entailed orientation towards different communities for protection. While people lived side by side, they also were suspicious of each other and anarchy gave opportunity for people's sadism against the despised other groups. Diverse? Yes. Tolerant? No.
South Africa is known as the Rainbow Nation for its many peoples. What is less publicized is the brutal murders of members of different groups. Boers (White South Africans of Dutch heritage who dominated the old government) are subject to numerous murders such as an attack on a supermarket where several children were shot. All White South Africans worry about farm murders and attacks on urban homes. Zulus feel the anarchy in their poor outskirts where it is estimated that 1 in 2 women have been raped. Zulus hate the Shona who dominate the key families on charge of the ANC and who have been the only ones feeding at the political trough of the South African government. Coloreds are derided as white underlings and must show their racial allegiance by condemning Whites. Indians get the worst of it as they are not part of the White social network but are hated for their wealth and productivity. Somali immigrants are murdered by crowds.
South Africa is far from anybody's ideal of tolerance but is a very diverse place.
Washington DC is roughly 1/3 White and 2/3 Black. Neighborhoods are spread in between each other but Whites and Blacks mix very little.
Yugoslavia broke apart for obvious reasons. The once diverse USSR is now the somewhat less diverse Russian Federation and other states. Iraq is contending with its ethnic diversity in other ways.
Another thing to note is that Austria has long been considered a diverse society in contemplating its pre-WWI period. Autria then was a state encompassing Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, parts of Poland, and Transylvania. Sadly, Czechs were insisting on greater political power in Bohemia and the struggles over political power used National identity as a source of support. The effect was to heighten chauvinism. It should be remembered that Hitler was referred by critics as "the Bohemian" (he lived just across the internal border with Bohemia in Austria) as he had imbibed much of the worst of the political culture of Austrian Germans. The result of the struggle to keep Austria together led to a recourse to demonizing a third party (the Jews). Hitler made many claims about Jews dominating the Professions in Germany that were inaccurate as applicable to Germany but were accurate in Austria.
Hitler was as much a product of Diversity as is Tex-Mex fast food.
A few of Murphy's laws might be germain to the conversation.
Nothing is as easy as it looks.
This is applicable in that no culture is the same as its appearance. That Bosnia was a region that had existed for hundreds of years as one region under the rule of other countries did not mean it could remain integrated on its own.
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Over time, there will be some idiot who might form any manner of group or movement. The relative proportions may differ but eventually some connection will be made. One does not normally think of Pakistanis and Punks in one sentence but there are Pakistani Punks in Northern England.
If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.
This is quite common as various crises divert attention and resources away from one front to another. This permits activity that had once been suppressed. Serbs wanted to be free from Roman (Byzantine) rule and when Roman forces were diverted in fighting Muslim attacks in the East, the Serbs had the opportunity to defeat the residual Roman forces in the area and become independent. People take crises as opportunities thereby putting much more stress on the system.
Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
No individual has a full understanding of a situation and bears into the old aphorism that "none of us are as dumb as all of us" when individual parts of an organization try to to work in different directions. Time will bring up the fact that anything that can go wrong will and there will always be a weakness that is not considered. Few thought that privatizing a large part of the US Army's logistical functions to private contractors would prove so expensive. The idea may have worked in the confined conditions of US bases at home but not when deployed in the middle of fighting in Iraq.
Murphy's Law of Thermodynamics
Things get worse under pressure.
This refers back to people having to make hard decisions. When Bosnia was fracturing along ethnic and religious lines, neighbors would face the problem that people they had known for decades would now spit at them and curse at them. The opportunity to achieve their differing goals tore people apart and pressure the various sides applied only made the hatred and violence grow. The habit of Muslim politicians to intimidate suspected recalcitrants made for a painful situations for Serbs in Muslim territory who were now victimized by Muslims seeking to prove their bona fides. The political pressure of having Muslims in Serb territory made Serb leaders decide that mass expulsions were their best option and hundreds of thousands of people were uprooted from where they had lived for hundreds of years with attendant recruits for the Muslim armies. Pressure from internal and external actors made people more desperate at optimistic in achieving their goals. They hoped to ride out the pressure by even more forceful acts that stimulated more hatred.
The first myth of management is that it exists.
Some people manage by the book, even though they don't know who wrote the book or even what book.
My response to these two is merged by their commonality in both expression and applicability. It is an error to suppose that politicians know enough to engineer a society. They are frequently average human beings (thus fallible) fulfilling a necessary role that is more to maintain the system than to cope with great stress. Usually, we do not need insightful leaders, just someone to be the ultimate arbiter. That means that while we cannot ignore the occasional burst of insight from a politician, we cannot count on it. They are working within they system they were brought into and frequently operated on the imagined society of their youth or propaganda, not life on the ground. They get ideas but these are frequently selected for their reinforcement of their current conception of life by similarly isolated people.
The Aquinas Axiom:
What the gods get away with, the cows don't.
This refers to the tendency of the rich to share a common culture of wealth. Among expatriates living in Eastern Europe, there is little distinction between American, Australian, Brazilian, Sudanese, Israeli, Pakistani, or Lebanese. They are bonded by their common luxury to a common popular culture oriented away from the concerns of survival that the rest of the population faced.
The wealthy also can afford to live in the fantasy that everybody is the same by virtue of living in segregated neighborhoods. Few places are as stark in this as Washington DC. The division between the White and Black parts of the city are very clear. Black parts rarely had lawns and if they did, any blade of grass would feel lonely. Garbage littered the streets and the signs of people unconcerned with order were evident. The White parts were distinctive by the cleanliness and order but also by their luxury and frequent orientation towards recreation.
As hostile as most of these Whites likely are to segregation, they accepted that Blacks and Whites (usually referred to as Poor by Whites for fear of offending) did not mix well and Public Transit did not reach far into White areas where higher-class commercial services were. A phrase the more polite Blacks used to describe Whites was that they were "not from around here" even if they had lived in the area their entire lives. The racial distinction was politely concealed but that detracted none from the animosity.
Diversity here made a major difference. Blacks had conspiracy theories blaming Whites and sometimes Jews for their troubles. Whites could feel a condescending "compassion" from their large suburban houses out of the way of the many poor Blacks and isolated from them in their everyday lives. Even Apartheid South Africa likely had more interaction in daily life between Whites and Blacks. Whites living in comfort isolated from Blacks could then suppose a number of reasons for Black ills but the distance made accurate assessments near impossible. The anti-intellectual nature of Black leadership and the focus on emotionally absolving oneself from blame are key aspects of the Black culture there. General unwillingness to focus on anything other than entertainment was a major feature among Black children. The effect of this on a society is to produce poor workers who lack the mental focus to rise. The will to rise was also destroyed by the insistence on the impossibility of it.
Were the claims of Racism true? Yes, no one who has seen the unconscious reactions of a White in DC when a Black man approaches him would deny that it existed. The problem is that its effect is assumed to be much larger than it is in impeding individual growth. The mutual suspicion is just another price of Diversity.
With such a upbeat example to end on, lets end on these observations.
O'Toole's Commentary
Murphy was an optimist.
NBC's Addendum to Murphy's Law
You never run out of things that can go wrong.
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