WHO’S THE REAL CLOSE-MINDED JERK?

IT IS NOT OBVIOUS THAT LIBERALS ACTUALLY VALUE DIVERSITY

The New York Times just celebrated Ireland’s referendum vote to repeal the constitutional ban on abortion with taunting glee. Oddly, nowhere in its victory dance did it bow even briefly to the signal liberal virtue of diversity.

In a news rather than opinion piece the Gray Lady chortled about “sweeping aside generations of conservative patriarchy and dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church. The surprising landslide cemented the nation’s liberal shift at a time when rightwing populism is on the rise in Europe and the Trump administration is imposing curbs on abortion rights in the United States.”

Not that they’re obsessed with Trump, you understand. Or Catholicism, which the piece beat like a rented mule, including the obligatory pedophile priest reference. And I’m not proposing to refight the referendum here. If abortion really is a fundamental right, the Times would naturally want to see it respected everywhere, just as some of us would like to see universal protection for free speech, property rights and the unborn.

The point here is that liberals deflect the gibe that their idea of diversity is people who look different but sound identical by insisting, as our prime minister just did in a New York University commencement address, that “Our celebration of difference needs to extend to differences of values and belief.” But there is a word for people who say one thing and do another. And it is not “diverse.”

At NYU, Trudeau denounced tribalism in various forms, from church attendance to gun ownership to, yes, being “pro-choice.” Yet his government infamously refuses summer job grant money to organizations not willing to endorse abortion in principle even if the specific application is unrelated to pro-life activism. Likewise the Times seems to feel no nostalgia whatsoever about Ireland becoming more like everywhere else, surely a loss of diversity even if justified in the name of social justice.

A few years back I encountered a book on Ireland published by the European Union (slogan “United in Diversity”) that shoved the shamrocks and leprechauns onto the rubbish heap of history and praised its cosmopolitan multicultural … being just like everywhere else. Eight times as many Polish as Gaelic speakers, the book gloated. The Galactic Metropolis. No Irish there there. And, by implication, good riddance to all that diversity muck.

Following the referendum, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said opponents may feel that Ireland “is no longer a country you recognize. I would like to reassure you that Ireland is still the same country today as it was before, just a little more tolerant, open and respectful.” But in what sense is it “the same?” And was anything of value lost on what Varadkar called “’the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows?”

In Education of a Wandering Man, Louis L’amour laments the disappearance of the seedy endof-the-earth ports he visited as a tramp sailor in the 1930s. They were dirty and dangerous. But does a liberal feel even a small pang at their vanishing in an increasingly homogeneous cosmopolitan world with 4G everywhere?

NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt started a superb 2008 TED talk about the values divide by saying a key marker of “liberalism” broadly speaking is “openness to experience.” And he twitted his liberal audience that now they could understand “why anybody would eat at Applebee’s … but not anybody that you know.”

It was a well-placed shaft because it is not obvious that liberals actually value diversity. Even their devotion to exotic cuisine seems monochromatic, since they do not and cannot go and have fun in places with bland food, instead denouncing them with tribal scorn.

At this point you may object that my own devotion to diversity has pretty strict limits. Genuine diversity must include habits we do not share or wish to. But I certainly don’t celebrate the existence anywhere of slavery, female genital mutilation or genocidal war.

True. But as conservative I am far more interested in the victory of good over evil than of diversity over sameness. Also, conservatives being of “gloomy temperament” desire a world free of error but do not expect it, and are thus less prone to fly into frustrated rage at any dissent from orthodoxy.

Conservatives do not just tolerate the dynamism of open societies, including staggering nonsense from political quackery to pet rocks. We genuinely foster it, whereas liberalism being perfectionist is liable to veer into stifling political correctness that chants about diversity in grim grey unison.

Given their reaction to it in practice, liberal praise for diversity in theory seems to me to muddy the waters. It diverts debate away from whether things they seek to enforce everywhere are indeed right in principle to who’s the closed-minded jerk.

It might not be who you think.

I AM FAR MORE INTERESTED IN THE VICTORY OF GOOD OVER EVIL.