The Pity Party (26 page)

In this brave new/old world, “No human community should be larger than 20,000 people,” because we need “vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.” Those communities will be distant from one another and surrounded by wilderness. In effect, “people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities.”

“Communication systems can link the communities,” Watson writes. Such systems will be imperative because his agenda is going to make travel between communities extremely difficult. For one thing, “We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.” For another, “Sea transportation should be by sail,” which would return nautical transport to the state of the art that prevailed the last time the world's population numbered one billion. We should re-create the clipper ships of that era, supplemented by a technology that was then—and is still—unavailable: “Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.”

Transportation will be largely superfluous, in any case, because our communities of twenty thousand or fewer people will be autonomous and self-sustaining. “All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.” Watson's consumption agenda will facilitate his energy agenda. “We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels.”

It goes without saying that to reverse two centuries of population growth, reducing the number of humans by 85 percent, will require having fewer children. Watson spells out one implication: most people won't have any children at all, and the criteria for determining which ones are worthy (and permitted?) to procreate will be more exacting than any standards humanity has ever recognized.

Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility, which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.
⁶⁰

“The only future more expensive and painful than a carbon-free one,” O'Hare writes, “is the
only other one on the table
,” which the planet will endure if humans' use of fossil fuels makes the world hotter and hotter. Watson's future is highly unlikely to be realized, but one can plausibly describe how it would be better than the climate change apocalypse. What is the less drastic alternative, the one
more
likely to be realized than Watson's, while still averting the catastrophe O'Hare and most environmentalists believe is upon us? In the continuing absence of a clear answer to that question, environmentalists' opposition to fracking and nuclear power is an exercise in fecklessness.

The defining characteristic of prescriptive bullshit, as I've been using the term here, is a strong preference for political stances that demonstrate one's heart is in the right place, combined with a relative indifference to whether the policies based on those stances, as actually implemented, do or even can achieve their intended results. Liberalism's diversity agenda qualifies, on these grounds, as meta-bullshit, prescriptive bullshit in the service of descriptive bullshit.

“Diversity” became, after the 1978 Supreme Court's
Bakke
decision, synonymous with “affirmative action” or the concept of social justice in general. It's rare to find an institution of higher education or large business enterprise in twenty-first-century America that does not have a diversity mission statement and staff members whose professional responsibility is to make the organization more diverse, and then make that diversity more successful and rewarding. The
Economist
noted in 2014, “The closest thing the business world has to a universally acknowledged truth is that diversity is a good thing: the more companies hire people from different backgrounds the more competitive they will become.”
⁶¹
A Rip van Winkle who went to sleep six months before
Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954 and woke up six months after
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
in 1978 would conclude that diversity had been the whole point of the civil rights movement.

In fact, the great diversity crusade came about through happenstance, and a determined rush to exploit it.
Bakke
was the Supreme Court's first big affirmative action case, brought when Allan Bakke filed suit after the University of California, Davis, medical school denied him admission. Bakke claimed he had been the victim of racial discrimination by the medical school since (a) he was white; and (b) several applicants who were members of minority groups were admitted to the program, despite having lower grades and test scores than his. This result came about because the school had set aside a certain number of positions in its entering class for nonwhites only.

Four of the Court's nine justices (Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, John Stevens, and Potter Stewart) ruled in favor of Bakke: the law prohibiting institutions and programs that receive federal funds from discriminating on account of race was applicable, they said, and the University of California broke it. Four other justices (Harry Blackmun, William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Byron White) ruled in favor of the university: the importance of increasing the number of black and Hispanic doctors, improving medical care in minority communities, and overcoming the legacy of racial discrimination in general were sufficient reasons to justify the medical school's racial classification policy, and the harm it inflicted upon Bakke. Affirmative action policies were legal and constitutional, they contended, provided their purpose is “not to demean or insult any racial group, but to remedy disadvantages cast on minorities by past racial prejudice.” In a concurring opinion Blackmun wrote, “[I]n order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”

The ninth justice, Lewis Powell, charted a middle course. He agreed that UC Davis had discriminated against Allan Bakke, and joined with the justices who ordered the university to admit him. He also, however, agreed with the four justices who ruled in the university's favor—up to a point. Educational institutions were justified in taking race into account, Powell contended, but
not
for the sake of remedying disadvantages resulting from past prejudice, or getting beyond race by taking account of race. The only permissible justification for race-conscious admissions policies, wrote Powell, is that universities have a compelling interest in “the attainment of a diverse student body,” which may take precedence over the applicant's right to have his credentials considered in a nondiscriminatory manner. Thus a medical school could legally enroll a student whose grades, test scores, and other credentials might not otherwise secure his admission if the applicant's “particular background—whether it be ethnic, geographic, culturally advantaged or disadvantaged—may bring to a professional school of medicine experiences, outlooks, and ideas that enrich the training of its student body and better equip its graduates” to discharge their professional duties. Powell ruled in Bakke's favor because he opposed quotas: every applicant should have the right to compete for every opening, rather than just for the ones not set aside in advance for members of a particular demographic group. But he ruled in favor of affirmative action, provided that demographic status was only a “plus” factor in the admissions process, “where race or ethnic background is simply one element—to be weighed fairly against other elements—in the selection process.”

With the endorsement of exactly one Supreme Court justice, then, diversity suddenly became affirmative action's raison d'être. (Not until 2003, in a case involving the University of Michigan's law school, did a majority of the Court finally endorse the diversity rationale.) One irony of the situation is that, even as in the 1950s editorialists all deplored conformity in interchangeable terms, America's leading public and private institutions embraced diversity after 1978 in exactly the same way. Diversity, it seems, is too important to abide diverse opinions about diversity, such as ones that might sanction some institutions' idiosyncratic commitment to homogeneity.

Furthermore, whether Powell intended it or not, his argument about plus factors had the primary effect of making the admissions process more opaque and hypocritical. A quota system explicitly discriminates against certain applicants. A “holistic” system, the term Sandra Day O'Connor employed in the Michigan case, uses race only as a plus factor, while leaving open the possibility it will be such a big plus factor as to be operationally indistinguishable from a quota. A study by sociologist Thomas Espenshade found that identifying yourself as a black applicant to three highly selective private universities was as valuable to your chances of gaining admission as a 230-point increase on your Scholastic Aptitude Test score, measured on a 400-to-1,600-point scale. Hispanic applicants got what amounted to a 185-point boost, while Asian-American applicants were assessed the equivalent of a 50-point penalty. Take away those plus (and minus) factors, and black and Hispanic acceptance rates would decline by more than 50 percent, with Asians receiving four out of every five acceptance letters that would have otherwise gone to black or Hispanic applicants. (Whites' acceptance rates would stay almost the same.)
⁶²

Well, wouldn't the more-Asian, less-black, less-Hispanic, and equally white freshman class created by abandoning affirmative action be as diverse as the less-Asian, more-black, and more-Hispanic one rendered by using it? According to
Slate
's Dahlia Lithwick, an affirmative action defender, Powell's diversity rationale was regarded as bullshit from day one, in that it invoked one goal for the purpose of promoting a different one:

What Justice Powell was calling race-neutral diversity was always known to be a code word for racial diversity. Powell wasn't really interested in filling colleges with Alsatian goat herders. He was looking for some neutral-sounding reason to give minority candidates a small “plus” in the admissions office.
⁶³

Moreover, diversity, as explained by Powell and championed by the subsequently created diversity-industrial complex, purports to be for the benefit of the entire student body, not just the students who get in because of it and would have been rejected in the absence of affirmative action. Students on campuses who wear T-shirts proclaiming “I'm not here to be your black experience” express an unimpeachable sentiment, but one totally at odds with the diversity rationale. Applicants who get a demographic-based bonus exceeding one standard deviation of the SAT score distribution are there precisely, according to Powell, to provide “experiences, outlooks, and ideas” that broaden and enhance their classmates' educational experience. “In other words,” writes Lithwick, “some white students are refused so that other white (and nonwhite) students may be enriched. This is the core of the ‘diversity' defense.”

As with guns or carbon emissions, the maximalist position on affirmative action, captured by Harry Blackmun's Orwellian formulation about treating people equally by treating them differently, has the virtue of making goals and standards reasonably clear. Whether any kind or amount of affirmative action would make race and ethnicity trivial factors in America's class structure may be doubted, but at least we would know that result if we saw it. By contrast, the goal of diversity does not admit of successful completion, even in theory. Institutions' compelling interest in having a variety of backgrounds and perspectives in the ranks of their students and employees is permanent, so the departure from race neutrality, the ostensible goal of the civil rights movement and legislation, is not just protracted but eternal.

Pursuing one goal by appealing to a different one will also be permanently dodgy, however. The
New York Times
reported in 2004 that of the 520 black Harvard undergraduates, 8 percent of the student body, “the majority of them—perhaps as many as two-thirds—[are] West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.” That leaves “only about a third of the students from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves.” It's a sensitive topic, so much so that the
Times
had to say “perhaps” and “about”—Harvard was among the many schools that did not gather this type of information about its students. “You need a philosophical discussion about what are the aims of affirmative action,” said the chairman of Harvard's sociology department. “If it's about getting black faces at Harvard, then you're doing fine. If it's about making up for 200 to 500 years of slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you're not doing well.”
⁶⁴

But the whole point of making diversity the justification for affirmative action was that liberals did not want to have, because they did not think they could win, a philosophical discussion about using affirmative action to make up for slavery and Jim Crow. Such a debate would have squarely confronted the question of reverse discrimination, which the one about diversity circumvented. Should Allan Bakke have been kept out of medical school because stifling his ambitions was a necessary and fair price to pay for getting beyond racism by taking race into account? Four life-tenured justices wanted to go down that road, but few politicians facing voters were prepared to follow. The safer argument called for rejecting applicants like Bakke for the sake of student bodies and workforces that would be gorgeous mosaics providing an eclectic array of perspectives.