The ‘diversity and inclusion’ ideology is fast becoming dangerous.
The concerning consequences of the prioritisation of DEI over almost everything else have become disturbingly clear
In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell’s essay on the moral harm done by linguistic fudges and jargon, we learn how the powerful use grandiose, empty phrases to hide their true meaning, or simply to cover the fact that there is none. “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness,” he noted. And when multi-syllabic, Latinate words of murky meaning are favoured over shorter, clearer turns of phrase, the results are often politically sinister.
This is an ingenious analysis not only of the political currents of Orwell’s day, but of ours. Indeed, nowhere have these absurd linguistic gymnastics and their acutely harmful effects been clearer than in the spread of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) ideology.
This is the latest short-hand for the system of belief that, as the American journalist Bari Weiss has put it, “replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad)... People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues.”
“Diversity”, “equity”, “inclusion”, “social justice”, “intersectional awareness”: when any of these words are spoken by woke theorists and their followers in Western institutions, they almost never seem to mean what they would appear to. Instead, they have become tools for enforcing a particular political project on the rest of us.
Over the past few years, the concerning consequences of the prioritisation of DEI over almost everything else have become disturbingly clear. Diversity and inclusion – which you would think ought to mean that members of every group have the same chance to succeed based on their talents – has become the opposite of meritocratic. And what must inevitably follow when ability, performance and practical outcomes are downgraded in favour of a political ideology can only be toxic.
Even companies like Boeing – one of the world’s most important manufacturers of aircraft, whose purpose ought to be singularly clear – appear to have been captured. Elon Musk suggested that it prioritised DEI over safety on social media last week, after a document emerged that seemed to show the company had started rewarding executives for hitting climate and DEI targets in 2022, shifting away from a sole focus on areas such as product safety and quality.
There is no suggestion that this has had any real-world impact. But it made for uncomfortable reading in a week in which some of Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 planes were grounded after one of them lost a section of fuselage as an Alaska Airways flight was departing Portland.
Grim examples of how the jeopardising of quality and safety follows absolute deference to the politics of DEI have been well documented in the medical profession – especially in America, where the trans agenda has interfered with medical lecturers’ ability even to talk about “women’s” health or flag sex-specific medical risks.
A similar scandal is afflicting the American Ivy League universities.
On the one hand, they risk an obvious plummeting in academic standards if more and more students are admitted not based on their academic potential or quality, but because their ethnic or sexual identity accords with notions of “marginalisation” (a word that would certainly have made Orwell squirm).
This may even be affecting academics and universities’ leadership. It looks increasingly likely that Claudine Gay, the ex-president of Harvard, could have been hired because she represented the DEI worldview. Certainly, the quality of her scholarship is up for debate amid accusations of plagiarism.
There also appears to be a creeping culture of seeking to spare the feelings of students, lest any constructive criticism or attempt to raise academic standards be branded a “micro-aggression”. A professor at Harvard told me recently that he cannot award grades lower than a B+ because the students can’t handle it, psychologically.
And then there are the Jews. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology – like intersectionality and social justice – never seems to include Jewish people. Not only that: it positively acts against us, making us the eternal “privileged” enemy.
Since Hamas’s invasion and killing spree in Israel on October 7, the total adherence to DEI ideology by American universities has shown for all the world to see how it facilitates the rankest abuse of Jews.
When pro-Palestinian activists began taking over campus with megaphones, signs, open letters, intimidation, classroom interference, and physically intimidating “protest” – including calling for the genocide of Jews and the total destruction of Israel – all too many university leaders did nothing.
Gay herself was a particularly extraordinary example of this. When asked in Congress if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s policies, she said that it “depends on the context”. Harvard is now facing a major law suit by Jewish students, accusing it of gross, persistent and endemic anti-Semitism.
This sorry turn of events is surely a direct result of the embrace by Harvard and the rest of the American institutional and educational landscape of a system of ideas that expresses itself in the bureaucratic – and dangerous – cadences of totalitarianism.
