In the adjacent post I put quotes around the adjective “diverse” in mentioning Thomas Sowell’s “diverse” contributions to the wide range of subjects he has addressed in his books. Is it possible to use the word “diversity” and its cognates unironically? It is possible, but I can’t do it.
That is at least in part thanks to National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood’s Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (2003). Wood’s professional training is in anthropology. Observing our strange ways, Wood made a classic contribution to intellectual and legal history. How did “diversity” evolve into the Orwellian euphemism with which we are all familiar? Wood tells the sorry story.
I trace the precursor to the invention of the modern concept of “diversity” to Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas. In his homecoming speech in Chicago on July 9, 1858, Douglas sounded the themes of the momentous campaign that Lincoln and Douglas waged that summer and fall for Douglas’s Senate seat. “Diversity” was one of his themes.
Douglas paid tribute to Lincoln as a “kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent,” but expressed his disagreement with Lincoln’s June 16 speech to the Illinois Republican convention that had named him its candidate for Douglas’s seat. According to Douglas, Lincoln’s assertion that the nation could not exist “half slave and half free” was inconsistent with the “diversity” in domestic institutions that was “the great safeguard of our liberties.”
Wrap your head around that, or put it in your pipe and smoke it. Then as now, “diversity” was a shibboleth hiding an evil institution that could not be defended on its own terms.
