The inclusion obsession

I gave this lecture at the 2013 meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club.

The “Inclusion” Obsession

by James Kalb

We hear a lot about inclusiveness, and it’s apparently very important, but the topic is never discussed analytically. The idea seems to be that it’s warm and fuzzy and just obviously a good thing. The result is that the social world is being radically transformed for the sake of a goal that hasn’t been thought through.

With that in mind, it seems like a good idea to ask what inclusiveness is, what it does, and where it comes from.

Its nature is fairly simple: it’s the egalitarian welfare state applied to the social environment. Every one of us is supposed to experience his social environment as equally accepting and affirming. That’s why discrimination and exclusion are supreme evils. They don’t accept or affirm.

With that in mind, inclusiveness demands changes that go to the heart of how people deal with each other. For example, it doesn’t like the idea that particular kinds of people can be more or less suitable for particular positions. More and less suitable means discrimination, and training and job redesign are supposed to take care of whatever issues there are. So if you’re running the Navy you’re expected to put women not only on submarines but in the SEALs. There may seem to be issues, but it’s your job to find a way around them.

Nor does inclusiveness want people to rely on common or complementary qualities when they form functional relationships. Some people don’t have those qualities, and that leaves them out. So inclusiveness doesn’t like old boy networks and so on. The idea seems to be that people who live and work together should build relationships based exclusively on common humanity, impersonal qualifications like academic degrees, and common devotion to fairness, diversity, and organizational mission statements. Specific understandings of marriage and family also have to go. Love and connectedness take many forms, and none can be preferred to any other.

Beyond that, inclusiveness doesn’t like particular culture. That’s the reason for the war against Christmas. If culture functions, so English people do English things in English settings and Italian people do Italian things in Italian settings, that excludes others. So human relations have to become a combination of individual choice, managerial know-how, and psychological and social therapy that applies the same way to everyone everywhere. If Chinese and Frenchmen work better with Chinese and Frenchmen, because they see things the same way and have similar habits, that has to change. The cooperative habits and informal knowledge that develop within culture and are responsible for the achievements of all civilizations have to be done away with.

The whole project is obviously disconnected from reality. It’s radically at odds with how human life works, so it can be relied on to make people cruder, stupider, less functional, and more isolated.

At some level people know that, so most people find inclusiveness and its demands stupid and disruptive. But if it’s so bad, and people know it, why are so many intelligent, experienced, and responsible people so firmly committed to it? Why does everything count in its favor and nothing against it?

People sometimes say it’s because of the media, or social pressure, or competitive status seeking. All that’s true in its way, but why do those forces all point in the direction they do? Resentment mongering might explain some of it, but resentments are universal, and they’re normally ignored or suppressed unless they’re considered justified.

To some extent the situation can be explained on semi-Marxist grounds. People whose position and wealth comes from money, bureaucratic status, and professional qualifications want to get rid of other competing principles of authority like family, religion, local community, and particular culture. They don’t like connections and distinctions like sex and culture that don’t lend themselves to quantification, supervision, and control by those at the top.

So it’s not surprising that people at the top like inclusiveness, which says in effect that all those messy opaque connections, distinctions, and authorities have to be done away with. Everything has to be put on a bureaucratic or monetary basis so it can be supervised and controlled. Experts, bureaucrats, lawyers, managers, therapists, and people with tons of money should run everything, because they’re the ones who run the only institutions that are allowed to work.

And in fact the great age of inclusiveness has turned out to be the great age of inequality based on money, organizational position, educational certification, and so on. Inclusiveness has helped destroy connections among ordinary people, and with them the habits, attitudes, and arrangements that help them lead orderly, decent, and productive lives. That’s why the last couple of decades have made Oprah a billionaire, and also reduced the average life expectancy of uneducated white women by five years.

Still, that explanation is not completely satisfying either. If the populace turns into a degraded mass of not-so-functional people, like the ones Charles Murray and Theodore Dalrymple write about, that’s not really helpful to people who are trying to run things. Also, people at the top really do believe in inclusiveness. It’s their religion, it’s viewed as an essential part of what it means to be a legitimate human being, and the higher someone’s IQ and the more years of schooling he has the more likely he is to believe in it.

That shows that inclusiveness has to do with the basic ways educated public thought makes sense of human life. So it seems that its causes must be very basic indeed. They have to do with fundamental concepts of what’s real, reasonable, and valuable that precede all particular judgments of reality and practicality.

So what’s going on? At bottom, inclusiveness comes out of the same attempt to make knowledge rigorous and human action sovereign over nature that led to modern science and technology. That may sound paradoxical but it seems pretty clear. The inclusivist demands I mentioned all insist on abolishing the effect of traditional social arrangements that can’t be made clear and controllable, like those relating to sex, family, religion, ethnicity, and particular culture. Instead, we’re supposed to have enlightenment, which means rule by arrangements that supposedly are simply rational, like neutral expert bureaucracies.

The point of the newer arrangements is supposed to be achieving whatever goals people happen to have. We’re not going to base anything on questionable claims about highest goods or objective moral order. Instead, we’ll go with preferences, which are concrete and demonstrable. Once we do that, though, equality becomes the natural standard: people equally have preferences, and their preferences are equally such, so all people and all preferences have an equal claim to fulfillment. (An exception I should mention is that preferences that don’t fit the system, like non-PC preferences, get kicked out.)

One preference almost everyone has is a preference for the esteem of other people. So that should be equalized as well. Esteem, after all, has to do with value, and value is thought to be subjective and therefore changeable through training. And since people give social respect very high priority, that kind of equality should get high priority as well. Exclusion violates that equality, so it should not be tolerated.

So in a very few steps rationalizing ways of thought applied to the construction of social environment bring us to inclusiveness. And that is a paradox, since inclusiveness is, among other things, antiscientific. It forbids inquiry, crushes dissenters, insists on falsehood, and has led to scientific fraud and in some cases physical force against researchers. And it has to do those things to exist. For an outlook on life to make sense it must fit the world as it is. So if you insist on inclusiveness you must insist that the world lends itself to it. The intellectual and political culture that insists on inclusiveness also insists that evidence, reason, neutral expertise, and science have the highest possible authority. Unfortunately, those things tell us that there are human differences that are both stubborn and important. That’s not helpful at all.

So there’s a problem, and the solution to the problem is absolute insistence that none of those things tell us what they tell us. Instead, they confirm the unique rationality of inclusiveness. If there seem to be conflicts with science, inclusiveness comes first, because it has to do with things people care about more. They care about their personal status and experiences more than they care about scientific results. Since science can’t simply be discarded, the solution is to modify it to bring it into conformity with the superior standard, inclusiveness. To all appearances pretty much everyone who matters agrees with that solution when it becomes an issue. When James Watson and Larry Summers got beaten up by the forces of inclusiveness, they didn’t say “the evidence says what it says,” they agreed with their attackers.

The reason inclusiveness goes so wrong is that it is part of an effort to make the technological outlook a general outlook on life, and that can’t be done. You achieve rigor at the cost of narrowing focus, for example by excluding qualitative issues in favor of what can be measured, so you can’t make everything rigorous. In particular, social life can’t be understood as mechanism, human beings can’t be turned into components let alone equal components of an infinitely adjustable machine, and esteem can’t be manufactured and divided up equally. If you try you end up with all sorts of oddities.

The reason the technological outlook is pushed beyond its limits is that it is seen as uniquely valid, and that’s important when you get to questions of basic social principle. A social order needs to be seen as entitled to respect, and it becomes entitled to respect by expressing the accepted understanding of what makes sense. Today it’s the technological understanding that people find convincing, so the social order has to express that understanding. Otherwise people won’t be able to look at it and say “that makes sense so I’ll go with it.”

That requirement is what leads to inclusiveness. Technology doesn’t distinguish good and bad purposes so the social order shouldn’t distinguish them either. Free to be you and me has to be the watchword. Technology doesn’t distinguish beneficiaries, so the social order should be egalitarian. Everybody should get what he wants equally and be treated equally. Technology wants to control the whole of visible reality, because modern science wants that kind of universal understanding, so social engineering should apply to everything in sight and the government is responsible for the total social environment.

To give up on that responsibility would be to give up on the application of reason to human life. It would say that the form of reason that defines rational action, which is now thought to be technology, applies to producing and distributing hamburgers but not to producing and distributing things we care about much more, like social position. People find that intolerable, because man is a social and rational animal who needs to believe that the social principles that define who he is and demand his allegiance and tell him what he should respect and disdain are reasonable in the highest degree. Otherwise he won’t really accept them or accept the authority of the social order they define. He’ll think of it as an arbitrary alien force that he wants to get out from under. People don’t want to live that way, and social authorities don’t want them to take that view, so the authorities are always going to identify themselves and what they do with what is considered highest and most reasonable and authoritative.

It’s worth noting that what matters from the standpoint of social authority is technology as image and ritual rather than actual technology. Actual technology is a boring drudge that sometimes helps you and sometimes doesn’t. In order to become the highest social principle it has to become symbolic. It’s the function of institutions like the Supreme Court and figures like Barack Obama to make it so. What the Supreme Court is supposed to do is dress up in robes, engage in rituals, and produce oracles that tell us that the legal order is rational and politically correct, and so worthy of our allegiance. And our current president, just by being what he is and performing ritual acts like giving speeches and appearing on “The View,” is thought to dispel dark and irrational forces and bring us into a new world of freedom, equality, and enlightenment. It is on such rituals that political legitimacy depends in an age that attempts to be comprehensively and consistently technological.

If what I’ve said is so, and the problem is the merger of technology, reason, and the sacred, what do we do about it? The obvious way back to sanity is an understanding of reason that makes it possible to think about human relations and the social order in a more sensible way. In principle such an understanding would make a great deal of sense on several grounds.

The point of modern science and technology is exact prediction and control. That means that it emphasizes quantity and specific causal mechanism. That’s why people want statistics and studies when you talk about anything whatever today. That way of thinking is extremely powerful where it applies, but its usefulness soon runs out. For example, the normal way to understand extremely complex evolved functional systems like human societies is not mathematics and mechanism but experience and typical configuration, functioning, and goals. In other words, the key to understanding a society of a particular type is to look at how it is set up and how it normally works and to what ends. It’s more like understanding the life and habits of an animal or conduct of an acquaintance than the workings of an automobile.

So the obvious way out of the hole we’re in is to embed the kind of reason used in the hard sciences, which emphasizes number and what Aristotle called material and efficient cause—that is to say, matter and the immediate forces that make it do things—within a larger conception of reasonableness that allows us to deal with situations where the methods of the hard sciences don’t tell us very much. In other words, we need to add to the mix quality, tradition, something like Aristotle’s formal and final cause, that is to say the functional configurations things fall into and the goals they typically work to bring about, and classical natural law, which is basically a statement of how human life and goals should be arranged so that the system works best.

All of which is a very long story with lots of complications and difficulties. It’s a matter of dethroning what’s considered the highest standard for reason and reality and replacing that standard with something else, and it’s extremely difficult to do that. So there’s not time to go into it all just now even if I were capable of dealing with all the problems adequately in all their aspects. If you want though you can read a bit more about how it all might work, discussed more from the point of view of common sense than formal philosophy, in my book Against Inclusiveness.

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