Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Book Review: The Diversity Illusion


Lax immigration policy has enriched the United Kingdom with millions of immigrants from Asia and Africa over the last half-century, to almost universal acclaim across the acceptable spectrum of elite political opinion. In the process, diversity has become, like it has in the US, the prime spiritual point of a new secular religion.

Ed West, who recently referenced our old friend Moldbug, wrote a book on the topic, concludes that many of the negative consequences have been overlooked.

In the introduction, he writes:

While Christianity was in steep decline, many of its values had seamlessly evolved into the new secular moral order.

Central to those values was the idea that racism was not only wrong, but the very worst evil… Racism was not just illogical and unscientific, it was a sin, and the gravest sin; while diversity, the love of foreigners, the highest virtue. Racism was to us what sexual impropriety was to the Victorians, the wrong around which we defined our moral worth; this would make rational discussion of issues involving immigration and its after effects very difficult.

Through the course of the book, West often references Enoch Powell, his ‘Rivers of Blood‘ speech from 1968, and the subsequent hounding of Powell from polite society.

England, like other countries which have embraced multiculturalism and mass immigration, faces the prospect of seeing its native population become a minority without seeing an armed invasion. West notes that, even though the original immigration policy was focused on economic benefits, the small number of initial immigrants brought in their family members. The shift in the character of the country has been stunning (p. 29):

In 1951 only 3 per cent of the population had been born outside the UK, and this included half a million Irish — Britain was still, despite the turbulence of a conflict that had shaken the world, much the same. In 1949 only a further 39 Jamaicans came over.

In Britain, similar to the US, almost the entire professorial class is left-wing, and aims to pull the entire culture leftwards to it. Although tabloid newspapers in the country appear to be superficially right-wing, they have almost no political influence. Further, churches in the UK are almost universally pro-diversity, even when many of the immigrants are Islamic (p. 65):

The moralisation of diversity is reflected in the fact that almost across the board churches in the West are pro-immigration, even though their congregations are not (in the US self-described Christians are more hostile to immigration than non-believers). In a sense secular universalism has grown on and replaced Christianity, which is also universalist and stresses sacrifice for the sake of humanity, although in Christianity altruism is voluntary, and comes with heavenly rewards…

The increase in diversity has also put stress on the welfare state in the country, as people tend to oppose welfare policies more when they believe that the transfer payments go to people who are fundamentally unlike them. This is one of the reasons why popular propaganda often seeks to display minority groups as having similar values and lifestyles to that of the shrinking majority — because otherwise, that majority will tend to become hostile to redistribution.

West defines the titular ‘diversity illusion’ (p.99):

The diversity illusion rests on the premise that humans will abandon nations, ethnic groups, or religious communities for wider loyalties, yet greater diversity probably has the opposite effect. In-groups and out-groups of race and tribe are contextual, and affected by demography. A lone Asian boy in a school of whites, or a lone Protestant in a school of Catholics, will not form an out-group, nor even will a small sprinking of minorities; he’ll be an exotic curiosity.

The increase in diversity heightens ethnic and religious consciousness, because the experience of more and more people becomes that of friction between mutually unintelligible groups. Various governments have also deluded themselves into believing that they can change the fundamental characteristics of various ethnic groups — believing that middle classes can be commanded into being by a clever policy tweak or two.

The author also tackles the comedy of ‘British values’ and ‘European values,’ which tends to stand for ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusiveness’ rather than what those terms actually once used to mean. Promotion of these values tends to instead encourage what’s called Islamic radicalism (p.155):

[When referring to British values] they were primarily talking of the right to contraception, abortion, and gay marriage, yet all of these are novelties, and to millions of Britons they are questionable ones. In contrast conservatives who admire Islam’s strong family values, modesty, and respect for the elderly compare it with British society’s increasing consumerism, sexualisation and child abandonment….

If a culture is defined by its decadence, is integration a triumph or a failure? When Muslim girls catch chlamydia at school and Muslim boys are being treated for cirrhosis of the liver in their 20s, will we celebrate the victory of Britishness?

It would be easy to mistake the term ‘British values’ for enthusiasm for sodomy, gender re-assignment surgery, and drug addiction, rather than the values espoused by the King James Bible and Shakespeare.

The diversity policy, in part, defends itself with what amount to new laws against blasphemy — these laws are euphemized by the term ‘hate speech.’

Over the course of the book, West also discusses how the Labour party and the broader left abandoned the white working class in favor of a coalition of minorities and grievance groups. Peter Hitchens has also written much on this topic.

The key argument that West makes which will be of interest to you is on page 220:

For forty years conservatives lost the arguments over immigration, despite overwhelming public support. They lost because they lost the intellectual justification for group solidarity and restricted altruism against post-war radical universalism, to the extent that normal human feelings were redefined as forms of mental illness. But Islam allowed conservatives to make arguments using language that liberals would permit.

One novel observation, at least to me, was that the internet also facilitates ethnic fragmentation among immigrant groups. For example, communities from Turkey can immigrate to the UK and behave almost exactly as if they were in Turkey, because they can beam down the entire Turkish media experience from the internet. They can socialize entirely within other groups of Turks and otherwise have almost no contact with the surrounding society.

In this way, immigrants behave like ‘reverse colonists,’ or rather, just like regular colonists, but without formal authorization. This has had devastating impacts on the security of the country, not to mention to the pride and happiness of its inhabitants.

Britons have found that their native country has turned into a typical Islamic slave-raiding territory, much like Slavic and Mediterranean countries were until Europe found its strength in the late pre-modern period.

This book will probably not be edgy enough for some of you — for example, it looks at mores were before the war, what they were after the war, but does not go into detail about the inflection point and what caused it. But this is one of its virtues, also, because it makes the book easy to recommend to moderates on both the left and the right, such as your likely family members and co-workers.

If you’re curious about some of the reasons why Britain is such a disaster zone, this text goes a long way towards explaining it and why the arguments underlying the diversity myth are faulty, without resorting to language which might set off the alarm bells in the mind of a normal Westerner who has been acculturated into the moral system which holds diversity to be the highest good.

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The Ludic Fallacy

Nassim Taleb introduced the term ‘ludic fallacy’ in Black Swan. You may think that you know the contents of the book from the press coverage even if you haven’t read it, but my suggestion would be to read it even if you think you know what it’s about — the coverage tends to be misleading.

If you have the book, you can flip to chapter nine and review it before you read the rest of this post.

The ludic fallacy is mistaking a model, especially a model of human behavior, for the real world. It’s partly intended as a caution against using game theory, economic theories resting on faulty assumptions of humanity (‘homo economicus’), and other artificial environments.

Taleb contrasts two characters: Fat Tony and Dr. John.

Basically, Fat Tony always looks for an angle and never expects fair competition. Dr. John expects the world to conform to the models that he has picked up through his studies, and anticipates that the world is fair, much like a game of chess in which both sides start out with almost perfect symmetry.

Dr. John thinks that his plan will work. Tony expects to be punched in the face and instead trusts more in his ad hoc assessments and empirical experience.

Taleb writes “A nerd is simply someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box.” America elevates these nerds into high positions because America is a place that produces boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon standardized boxes, and does its best to mold its territory into a series of rationalized, predictable boxes. Yet nature dislikes being confined to such boxes and strains against them, despite the nerd’s attempts to eliminate unpredictability.

Even in highly managed environments, like the casino Taleb uses in this chapter, can be struck by difficult-to-predict catastrophes — the largest loss incurred by the casino in question, of $100 million, happened when Roy of ‘Siegfried & Roy’ was mauled by his white tiger, despite decades of placid behavior by the great cat. The casino was robust against card-counters and cheaters, but vulnerable against a shock from an unforeseen angle.

The desire to make the world predictable can blind people to reality:

It is why we Platonify, liking known schemas and well-organized knowledge — to the point of blindness to reality. It is why we fall for the problem of induction, why we confirm. It is why those who “study” and fare well in school have a tendency to be suckers for the ludic fallacy.

Taleb suggests that you denarrate — disconnect from media, including blogs, in part to train yourself to spot “the difference between the sensational and the empirical.”

He expands on the concept in Antifragile, particularly in Chapter 16, when he compares the ‘ecological and the ludic.’ Football is a game. War is not a game. But people often try to draw lessons from football to apply to domains like war and business. Similarly, business is governed by laws, but war usually operates under an entirely different set of laws which may or may not be enforceable.

From p. 241:

It is not well advertised that there is no evidence that abilities in chess lead to better reasoning off the chessboard— even those who play blind chess games with an entire cohort can’t remember things outside the board better than a regular person.

And later:

Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.

The way to gain an advantage over nerds is to just take advantage of their predictability.

If you know the model that they’re operating under, you can generally predict how they will blunder, and then position yourself to gain an advantage as they stumble. They can’t handle volatility because it breaks their mental models, which makes them panic. A sucker punch sends them scrambling to try to make their world predictable, solid, and box-like again.

The progressive project primarily works by conflating their models for the underlying world. Their priests believe that by changing the models, they can change the underlying reality. Because so many of the people who most fervently believe in the writ of progress live almost entirely in a model world rather than the real one (hence the Starbucks full of people staring into screens), they tend to be oblivious to changes in the natural world.

So, the focus ought to be on what can be done to de-Platonify life, rather than launching endless new counter-models against the ones who insist that everything can be rationalized.

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Xenophobe Talks Sex & Race Relations

It’s sort of a rambling post, but it probably communicates a lot of what many men are thinking, but not willing to express themselves.

From the conclusion:

Depending where you live, there are still plenty of nice American girls who want nothing to do with radical feminism. These girls want to get married and have families just like you do. Sure, odds are you’ll probably wind up getting raped in divorce court someday and losing it all, but the risk might be worth it. While they may not be as reliably submissive as their third world counterparts, American women at least speak the same language as you, grew up learning about the same heroes and possibly will have even watched the same cartoons as children(unless there’s a huge age difference and you’re robbing the cradle, in which case… good for you.) For low time preference individuals, the bond of shared history and common ancestry is too strong to be broken by the frivolity of modern feminist brainwashing and “interracial male bonding sessions.” At least, we hope it is, for the sake of our children and the world they will have to live in. Short of a massive alien invasion or diabolical female plot to take over the world, that’s unlikely to change.

Something like this has generally kept me away from expatriation over the last several years.

Part of it has to do with the fact that as much as I sometimes dislike American culture and politics, it’s still mine. This might be, also, a similar impulse keeps other people in unfathomably terrible and lowly little countries around the world.

I can’t really say that I’ve ever been that tempted by foreign women. Even when I was a good progressive about race, I just never felt much of any xenophilia. It’s really about the hair for me.

Xenophobe goes on to say:

The thing is, I simply don’t hate feminists enough to embrace multiculturalism. While radfems like to talk tough, at the end of the day they are more of a nuisance than anything. As soon as we collectively decide we’ve had enough of their crap, we can put them in their place whenever we feel like it.

Although feminists occupy many places of influence, in the world of everyday people, they have almost no influence. They influence the legal structure and the ambient culture, but most women that you meet about town have no inkling of real feminism beyond maybe a class or two that they attended in college. They exist in larger numbers in the major cities, but even there, they’re not all that prevalent in an absolute sense.

Most Americans, even among whites, don’t attend college. They receive little strong indoctrination. Even those that go to ‘good schools’ can be talked into or out of anything if you’re glib and persuasive enough.

The larger problems come from parenting, moral values, social groups, and expectations. While it may be trivial to argue most women into anything you want her to believe as soon as you have her hooked, it’s not nearly so easy to get that same person to actually be all that useful as someone who could be an effective wife and mother. And after the marriage, she has every legal incentive to cook your goose in court.

Most of them, even the ones with nominal religious belief, have been partying (a funny euphemism) since their early teens or before. The lifelong acculturation that used to go in to producing cooperative family life is not present any longer. For that matter, neither is the career orientation or work ethic that used to be instilled into American men. Standards have declined across the board.

It’s less the ideology, and more the passive absorbers of the ideology who cause the problems for most people. Those people have to be the ones whom you harden against the message, more so than angling to debate the people creating that message. It’s less the ideologue, and more the girl who can’t cook and has bad manners. The latter is endemic. The former is a tiny, loud minority.

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