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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32864 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I’m taking a diversity training today which opened with the following:

It’s diversity and inclusion, not diversity and isolation, yet the sad fact is that despite our best intentions, many of us feel excluded and alone at work.

A study conducted by behavioral scientists Carr and Reece found that a whopping 40% of us feel that sense of isolation on the job.

That means that despite the nearly $8B businesses typically spend each year on D&I training, nearly half of the employees still don’t feel like they belong.

Obviously, the architects of this particular training didn’t decide to “spend less on candles.” Nor did they pivot into a deep discussion of training efficacy and reform, which I would have found fascinating, but isn’t remotely relevant to my job. The rest of the training segment, instead, fumbles towards the idea that cultivating Belonging is the real goal.

A focus on diversity can only go so far if the next step is assimilation or exclusion.

Out of curiosity, I tried to track down the initial study. Carr and Reece wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review which included the 40% claim, citing a separate HBR article written by an Ernst & Young executive. In turn, that one pointed to an E&Y press release. Supposedly, there was a “Belonging Barometer” survey of 1,000 adults. The trail ends with a link-rotted press release and no sign of any peer review or data.

This doesn’t stop stop the training from embedding an E&Y video and otherwise parroting points from the articles. It concludes with a quiz and a cutesy certificate. If I go make fun of it with my coworkers over drinks, we can bond. Perhaps the company would consider its slice of that $8 billion to be well spent.

The rest of the training segment, instead, fumbles towards the idea that cultivating Belonging is the real goal.

The term belonging has a specific meaning in critical studies, there is a good writeup on James Lindsay's encyclopedia. So this concept basically takes inclusion even further, you are not only required not to do bad stuff like microaggressions that can exclude marginalized categories, you also have to participate on all DEI activities proactively and enthusiastically, otherwise you are excluding. I feel sorry for you.

In the broader sense I like how Lindsay described DIE initiatives. Diversity really means experts on diversity. It does not necessarily mean to have people of different colors and genders and sexualities, it means having all those people but above all else they must adhere to Social Justice movement and ideology, otherwise they do not count - they "ain't black". So diversity means employing ideological commissars. Now the main tool of these commissars is inclusion. The agenda is to exclude all thoughts and ideologies opposing Social Justice, marking them as violence that creates unsafe space and so forth supposedly producing exclusion. Inclusion really is censorship. And equity is of course the age old left doctrine: you have to build commissariat that administratively redistributes resources, positions, social status, promotions and so forth from those who were identified by commissars as oppressors to those who are in line with what commissars want and who are thus oppressed or allies. And of course it goes without saying that given that commissars have a very important and tough job ahead of them, they have to get some resources as well. Equity is just expanded concept of socialism.

Even though DEI may sound good and for sure many people genuine believe in it, it is exceedingly prone and one can even say designed to incentivize grift as well as reproduction: it saps company resources aimed at making their products or services in order to spread Social Justice inside and outside of the company.

Your post, especially in lines like

Equity is just expanded concept of socialism.

reads as a chain of assertions that all these different ideas you are opposed to are really the same or closely related (and so presumably you expect all those who oppose a subset of them to join you in opposing all). You need to justify statements like that, especially since it seems that there are superficially quite obvious counterexamples (type specimens of socialism are concerned with the socioeconomically disadvantaged, whereas US equity ideology fairly reliably favours the rich and urbane over the poor and boorish).

whereas US equity ideology fairly reliably favours the rich and urbane over the poor and boorish).

So does socialism, in many cases. It's hardly novel to note that much of the energy and leadership in socialist movements comes from upperclass failsons who reliably prioritize using the movement to claim status and resources for themselves over actually helping the truly disadvantaged. Writers like Orwell and Steinbeck were noting this dynamic a century ago.

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